looking for Katana Set 5 pre 5.24 owners

is here anyone who own HKT-01 box, not final 5.24 but some of earlier ones ? have a couple of questions.

 

Just post your questions, it's assemblergames, still (I hope) the place with the most katana devkit owners

 

main question - is there anyone at all 2nd Q - which version of Holly chipset it have ? it's revision shown in Set5 checker mode at "S_BUS" line.

main goal - check if early Holly have some debug registers, related to BIOS sum security, which may be present in early revisions but removed in mass production units.
because, hey - this year will be 20 year since Dreamcast was released, but it's protection is still not reverse engineered or (really) cracked! (but only avoided in a silly way, using chunk of NAOMI HOTD2 proto BIOS)
I think its good time to finish with this, or at least try to.

 

Unfortunatly, mine's a 0x0A, so the most common 5.24, but I'm pretty sure there are older revisions floating around...
Just have to wait for somebody to react.
If you directly post what / how to check, people might answer that.

 

thanks for checking. still good result, 0x0A corresponds to 2.4/2.41 revision, while latest mentioned in docs is 0x0B (2.42), and VA1 DC or NAOMI have it even newer - 0x10. so earlier than common mass production devices.

need to poke/peek number of registers, compile and run equivalent of such C code:

Code:

typedef volatile unsigned int u32;
u32 * regs = (u32*)0xA05F74E0;
u32 * rom = (u32*)0xA0000000;
u32 tmp;

regs[1] = 0x1FFFFF;
tmp = rom[0]; tmp = rom[1]; tmp = rom[2]; tmp = rom[3];
printf("%4x %4x %4x %4x\n", regs[0], regs[1], regs[2], regs[3]);
printf("%4x %4x %4x %4x\n", regs[4], regs[5], regs[6], regs[7]);

 

Here's the result on a 0x0A:

00000000 0000001E 00000000 00000000
00000000 1FFF7FE0 01FFFFE0 00000000

 

@japanese_cake know a lot abour DC_bios.

 

from what did you so decide?
he uses :

 

I can confirm that set 4 (similar to set 5) and set 2 (a PowerVR pci card basically) exists. I reckon Mark30k1 had both at some point, but he disappeared online since.

EDIT: I just realised you're searching for set X with X such that 5 < X < 5.24. I don't remember if those were seen in the wild. Maybe try to find a cached version of SegaKatana.com.

 

@-=FamilyGuy=- docs said there also was such Set 5 versions : 5.05 (Holly 1.1), 5.16 (Holly 1.6), 5.22 (Holly 2.2), 5.23 (Holly 2.3)
agree, they are rare and hard to find, but iirc I've seen in the net Katana test mode photo with S_BUS 0x09 = Holly 2.3, so I still hold a bit of hope.

Set 4 was quite different beast, there is early prerelease/beta SH4 CPU (with a bunch of bugs) and "ARC1" GPU chip, which had no BIOS protection yet, so useless for this research.

 

Maybe @ASSEMbler can chime in? You still have a few Katanas don't you?

 

For archiving purposes / to keep the discussion public for anyone interested:
I did some extra tests, but the 8 u32 values I posted before always remain identical, so this seems a dead end on a 0x0A-devkit.
Tested with CodeWarrior & CodeScape via SDK 11

 

@T_chan, same for retail HKT-3030 console