Hello All New to the forums.. :friendly_wink: As an old coder back in the day, I was digging through some of my old source code and discovered my old Megadrive & Game Gear development kits. These kits were produced by Codemasters in the early 90s. Plug these into a standard retail console, attach the cable to a PC (I have some PC cards) and you have a complete development setup. Megadrive Kit: This was used to develop Micro machines (2?) Game Gear dev kit: The one was used to create virtually all Codemasters music drivers (Drop Zone, Micro Machines, Pete Sampras Tennis etc etc...) interested in thoughts on value...
Reported for trying to bypass rules. You cannot tell people to PM you about buying it "To sell on this forum you must obey these rules and have two things: 50 posts Three months membership (If you joined in March, you cannot sell until June) There is no post requirement for buying. Spam posting to reach the 50 post mark will be noticed and you will be banned."
I've seen a few Mega Drive 'card' dev kits trade hands for between £50-175 depending on lineage, but commonly they would include some software and have a bit of a rep with them. If you can find someone who's a big fan of Micro Machines, you could be in with a chance. Do they have any content on/with them? That will also greatly affect their price.
Firstly, welcome! Interesting items - thanks for sharing. I'm sure we'd all be interested to hear your stories from these days - care to share? There are probably those who'd like to ask some tech stuff. Do you have any code you'd be willing to share?
apologies for the year delay replying.... Both these dev kits were built in house at Codemasters in the early 90's. At the time Codies couldn't get a license to publish titles for SEGA (or Nintendo for that matter) so reverse engineered the Game Gear, Megadrive (Genesis) NES and SNES and built their own development kits. I wrote music drivers on the Game Gear, and I helped to decode some of the sound chips (TED I think?). We were faxed updates to the reverse engineered manuals weekly as things progressed. Often complete chip sets were just ???????? As we figured out what they did, we sent back updates to Codies and they updated the manuals accordingly. I still have loads of source code from back in the day, but its all copyright and owned by Codemasters. I found several Megadrive ROMS of unreleased titles (Micro Monsters was a good one, years later re-created as Micro Maniacs) - coded by CJ Elephant Antics coder, Dave Clarke. I recently had both the dev kits tested and they still work... Anyone has questions, PM me..
Hehe, welcome back! I love that - sometimes we get people bump a post a year later, but hardly ever an answer a year later! Always good to have a bit of internal info, especially on obscure hardware! It's interesting to hear something about how a not-unknown even back then software house had difficulties getting licensed. Was that to do with the Game Genie, or was it before that, even? What was your company - were you in the industry, or more electronics-based? I loved CJ on the Spectrum! Come to think of it, I loved Codemasters in general. Dizzy, Slightly Magic, all the Simulator games... and I named my rabbit Seymour after the game! It's great to hear that you still have the gear and it's all working! And good to hear there's some source code safe, even if it can't be shown off! Thanks for sharing some info! I'm sure you'll get many questions!
