I was sold a Dreamcast Dev cord by someone. included are pics. It seems to have a VGA female port thought, and looks like a Chinese knockoff, is this true?
This is what is colloquially called a coder's cable. It's simply a way to interface the Dreamcast with a PC via their respective serial ports (it's a serial connector, not VGA). You can load code, debug homebrrw, and dump gd-roms and vmu saves among other things. Check it up online there's a ton of info about it.
Thank you, It looked like a VGA cord to me, that's why I was confused. so does it look like an official one?
"official" doesn't really apply to coders cable you could have just built one. It looks like it's well made, most are just a shrink tube home made cable.
The electrical design is by Sega, it's just s clone of the katana serial PCB, but there's no retail official Sega coder's cable. As ASSEMbler said, yours seems well-made.
there is some design ? 0_0 it is by Sega ? this is widely used 5-12v level converter, there dosens of cables doing exactly the same for old cellphones or OBD -II car diganostics. schematics is so simple so there nothing to 'design'. the difference is connector(s), this one cable have DC serial.
Well, my point was that the coder's cable schematic is the exact same as the one of the katana serial PCB. My guess was that the warez groups guys that had access to the devkits simply borrowed the design to make their own cables. If it's a very standard design (simple scaling of logic voltage iiuc) then I guess my assumption was wrong. Nonetheless, the closest thing to a Sega official coder's cable is the katana serial PCB .
