Mysterious Rareware proto cart on eBay?

Hi,

Someone would he be able to explain the function of every connectors.
Both from the front and back, so that / those where cartridge has been pierced.
And especially what kind of thing to connect.
Thank you not to refer me to Rarewarecentral site.

 

its easy this cartridge surely would connect a computer-based software via the big connector on top. it was used that when games were programmed on a computer, then the guy wanted to test the program via the n64 console... so the game passed from the computer to this cartidge to the n64..

its my guess really.. so this thing acted simply as a ''connector'' between but maybe it could also keep the game within itself ...

 

i just speculate, i dont know the customs of that times.... might the small connector on top was an additional video connector... might the hole cut connector on the cartridge allowed to test tensions, etc...

 

Just a guess but I think the small port could be a serial port, Maybe it was connected to a terminal to print debug messages? I don't know anything about N64 dev kits so I'm probably wrong. I bet somebody here knows what it does.

 

The 9-pin D connector is for a little dongle that has a CIC on it. The SCSI connector just connects to a SCSI card to load data into the cart.

The socket on the other side of the board is just a standard cartridge socket - I've been told you could put a cart in there and use the CIC on that rather than the one on the 9-pin dongle.

The two holes cut in the case are used for reflashing the internal chips - the upper one is a JTAG port for the CPU and the lower one is for the FPGA.

In normal operation the only things that need to be connected are the CIC dongle on the 9-pin socket and the SCSI.

 

Looks like I couldn't be more wrong if I tried. Thank for the info TriMesh Interesting stuff

 

It wasn't a bad guess given the connector.

I also just got an IM from one of my friends:

"Actually, not quite right - there generally was a cart plugged into that socket, but it wasn't for the CIC. They were standard N64 cart shells with a little custom flash ROM board in them, and the data in the flash was different for each game. The code in the game checked for those values and would refuse to boot if it didn't find them. The idea was that if someone somehow got hold of the code, they wouldn't be able to run it unless they could get hold of one of our (custom made) flash carts, the right CIC plug and the correct security flash cart."

 

Rareware developed the N64 games on SGI station. I would like to know what the different materials that connected them.
If anyone has more documentation on this subject.

 

The original N64 devboard plugged into an SGI Indy using the GIO slots - it was basically the N64 chipset with a DRAM based cartridge emulator and a debug capability based on the SGI/MIPS RMON interface. It also had a non-standard controller interface, although later Nintendo produced an adapter card that plugged into the jacks on the card and let you use standard N64 controllers.

The SGI based system had a number of restrictions - the biggest one was that it only had 16MB of cartridge emulator RAM, so if you were developing a game larger than that you had to split it up into smaller pieces for testing. It also didn't implement the security architecture that was in the real console (it had no CIC and a partial emulation of the PIF). This was a problem for companies like Rare who liked to put secondary security checks into their code to reduce piracy.

The cart that Rare developed addressed these problems - it had the capacity for more memory, and because it ran on retail hardware with a plug-in CIC the standard retail N64 security stuff was in place.

 

The following links give an idea of ​​connections between a PC / SGI station and some tools.

http://n64devkit.square7.ch/tools/
http://n64devkit.square7.ch/tools/system.htm

Would I be wrong in saying that all the N64 dev cart, even those of Rareware were created by Intelligent Systems company?
I would be interested to know the development tools used Rare Ltd. during the Nintendo 64 and 64DD period.

 

I'm honestly not sure any of them were Intelligent Systems.

The original devboard that went into an Indy was clearly an SGI product (the first ones had pre-production silicon, and it just looked like an SGI board, anyway).

The Partner-64 was alll marked as "KuC" (Kyoto Microcomputer) - possibly there was some involvement from IS, but it's not obvious.

That Rare board was apparently a custom design - at the least, the only logo on it is the Rare one.

SN64 was SN systems - I don't know how widely it was used, but it was certainly on the market.

Nintendo EAD also had their own RAM based N64 devleopment cart which was apparently made by ALPS. I've never actually seen one in real life, though.

Edit:

IS-Viewer obviously was an Intelligent Systems product, but it was never sold as a development tool due to the lack of debug capability. Apparently it did support upload of code over SCSI though, so it presumably could have been used for testing code.

 

Today I want to talk about Nintendo EAD cart my little collection.

Here are some pictures I took.





It contains the Diddy Kong Racing game is in two languages ​​(English and French).
A Rareware game on this type of cartridge, so I asked the same question as in the previous flash carts.
What is its storage capacity, and especially are there any documentation on its use?

 

Very nice, I want that so bad!