So at work today, a coworker of mine was given a Dreamcast Devkit from someone that was leaving the company. The guy was getting rid of stuff in his office and wanted it to go to a collector/enthusiast so my friend nabbed it. When he mentioned it to me, I knew it was probably a Katana as I've heard/seen them pass through assembler on my years here. We grabbed a power cable and a VGA cable to see if we could get it to boot. It powered up fine, but we were getting no video so we decided to try it via composite. After lots of 'What year do you think this is? 1990???' comments around the office, we managed to hunt one down and we plugged it in. The unit appeared to be sitting at a screen asking us to set the time. So it is at least be somewhat functional still. After setting the time, it sat at a "please wait, checking disk" screen for what seemed like awhile, or maybe we were just impatient. We left soon after and will poke at it tomorrow if we have the time. Pics cuz no good thread comes without them. TBH we've classically been more Xbox & Sony guys in terms of collecting, so this territory is a bit foreign to me. Is there a HDD in Katana Units? If there's anything on it, it'd be nice to investigate or preserve any of its goodies. We know next to nothing about these things, so we decided not to mess with any of the DIP's either. Please advise our nubby Dreamcast ways ): -Doom
Very exciting. While I can't offer any help specifically, I will say it's always nice seeing a Katana in good hands. Hopefully one of the Dreamcast gurus on here can help. I can't wait to see what you find!
Tell me if I'm wrong, but that's not quite a Katana, it's an HKT-01 Dev Box (as it says on the label ). That's about as far as my knowledge goes unfortunately, but there's literal boatloads of people here who know infinitely more.
I...i...its BEAUTIFUL!! There is no HDD in it at all. As far as the "Reading Disc" goes, I am not trying to hop to conclusions here, but maybe the drive is bad? I can only hope not, though.
Alright alright, enough useless comments (especially me), maybe we should just leave this for the knowledgeable people.
First off beautiful kit! And second there is a chance that the disc drive is in the wrong mode. When I finally got my unit working I realized that I had to connect my kit to the pc (win xp with the Katana SDK 10 installed) via SCSI (port A) and run GD Workshop I think it was. In that program you can switch how the dev box disc drive reads games. For instance if you want to put the box in emulation mode you wont get a picture. But part of that process is to also put the disc drive into emulation mode. To undo both you first run DA Check (via a windows xp pc its in the Katana SDK rev 10) immediately close the program and choose bios. Now the unit will boot properly. Then to get it to read games properly (assuming the disc drive works) you need to open GD Workshop (also part of the Katana SDK rev 10) and somewhere in there is an option to switch the dev box disc drive mode. You want to change it to GD Rom I think is the option. Once you do that (assuming that is the problem) everything should work fine now. Hope this helped. My memory is a little rusty on this stuff.
And I have seen a lot of dev boxes in the past (I even own a HKT-0120 like yours) but I have never seen a rotary switch like the one on your unit. Its very interesting.
+1 for the Saturn 3D controller. You should do a proper dump of the HDD asap to be sure not to lose any information it might hold.
If you look at my dev box its looks a bit different than yours. Mine along with almost every other dev box I have seen looks like this: http://imgur.com/8jrpIAX Notice how your dev box have a sticker to label the switches, your rotary switch is completely different in style, and your dip switches look like they are a different color. Again, very interesting. EDIT: You also don't have the A B C D sticker under the controller ports.
Thanks for the help guys. I'll see if we can acquire the SCSI cables/computer/SDKs necessary to better interact/pull stuff off of this. Is there anyway to dump the HDD purely over the SCSI ports on the back, or will we have to open it up and actually pull the HDD out? I'd rather get a raw disk dump before trying to get it into a more normal state. And based on where we work, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a slightly earlier revision / beta version of the kit. Might explain some of the finer differences. -Doom
I thought that was the back of a Saturn 3D controller but it didn't connect in my mind. +infinity, I love that thing.
Once you have the system hooked up to a Windows xp pc you can see half of the HDD. To see both partitions you would need to use a Windows 95/98 pc.
[GALLERY=media, 597]Screenshot_2015-09-16-15-14-11 by jakeeeenator posted Jan 5, 2016 at 8:36 AM[/GALLERY] Here is a picture that should help you with the dip switches and rotary switch.
When it comes to the dip switches always remember: 1 and 2 off is regular AV and S Video out, 1 on and 2 off is rgb out, 1 and 2 on is VGA (you can also connect the red and white composite cables for audio, And the first 3 off and 4 on is the self test mode. It would probably be a good idea to run this to make sure nothing is wrong with the unit. This mode only displays in VGA
Actually, that's just the cap of the rotary switch that is missing. (You can remove the cap from the rotary switch of your HKT-01 & get the same result.)
