title. I’m trying to see if it’s worth it just to get a debug kit or wait for a dev kit to pop up on the market.
The development kit has a serial port (connected to the LPC bus) and the target card for the DVD-ROM emulator. Unless you have the host card for the DVD emulator and the correct cable the development kit offers essentially no added functionality over a debug kit. You can also do development with a modified retail console, PBL and the patched debug kit boot ROM - the only significant restriction of this setup is that it only has the 64MB of RAM that were fitted to retail boxes rather than the 128MB that the debug and dev kits had.
The DVD-ROM emulator is pretty useless for homebrew. It's purpose was emulating an "optical drive and it's slowness" to see if it had influence upon the game. I assume you don't intend to burn optical game disks. If a retail console is not a 1.6 or 1.6b, you can even solder in 4 additional ram chips to have the same amount of memory as a debug unit. It's just not a beginners job as those chips are 100 pins fine pitch.
