Hey Guys, I keep hearing the name "cross products" being used often when talking about Sega development hardware, did they actually design the development hardware or did they just manufacture the hardware? And what other things were they involved in things? Sorry if there has already been a thread about this or if it's easily found information Thanks for reading!
Cross Products were a third party manufacturer of development hardware. Much of their "manufacture" was actually modifying retail consoles for development use, which is why most of their products look like Frankensteined retail units with off-the-shelf buttons and switches drilled into them, although their PCI/ISA cards and some supporting hardware were professionally made.
Ah okay I see, did they produce development hardware for any other companies? Or were they connected to Sega or something?
Not true. Cross Products designed and made SNASM. They made SNASM kits for many consoles - not just Sega. They were eventually bought by Sega, though. If you think most of their products are 'just' modified retail consoles, then you probably haven't seen the complete kit! The CartDev for Saturn, for example, is a system that sits under a stock Saturn - although you could also purchase a Saturn that they had modified to use their CD emulator, the Mirage - again, custom designed by them.
What about the Katana dev kit? That looks like a purpose designed system with it's own case and everything, or is that literally just a Dreamcast plus some switches thrown into a standard PC case?
Entirely right, I've just pulled my Mega-CD dev unit to pieces and damn does that thing have some kookiness to it! Quite fun really! This one looks to have been repaired by Cross in 1994 and has date codes of 1992 all through it. Have a peek at the differences in the internals! Do we know when Cross was purchased by Sega? Post-Mega Drive, Pre-Saturn possibly?
)Did you dump the roms to see it they are different than mine ? (http://www.elbarto.org/index.php/sega-megacd-development/)
It's still in pieces, was going to try and do that today! :encouragement: Edit: Found this snippet from some random archive. Looks like Sega sold Cross Products in 2001.
