"RARE" 64MB N64 Dev Card

Well another night another new item to show you. It's a 64MB RARE development card. This is the first 64MB dev cart I've seen, most likely used to develop games like conker. The D connector at the top was used for CIC chip dongles. You can change CIC chips easily with this cart using the dongles. Click on the image for more pics of the cart and dongles.




I picked up a few of these so a few will be for sale in the marketplace in the future. I'm in search of software for it right now, it's probably a long shot of ever finding it though.......

 

Interesting piece, I like how RARE's logo is present on the board.

 

Yes they were an awesome machine, its a shame they have slipped

 

Marshall would find this useful for the CIC reverse engineering.

Interesting how they also used (what seems like) an FPGA IC by ALTERA.

 

Wow that is a very interesting board. Honestly everdrive 64 will probably go down in history as the best selling flash cart ever. However from what I read marshalls cart is actually selling pretty well (most likely to some extra features the everdrive doesn't have and people having another option if they can't secure an everdrive 64).

 

What do you mean? KrikZZ has already reverse engineered the CIC??

 

Nice looking board, why did they slip over to Microsoft anyway? Like really..

 

Because Money Talks and well yeah. Bad decision on Nintendo's behalf (not that it has really affected them that much).

 

I think Dinosaur Planet was supposed to be 512Mbit as well.

Congrats on a very nice find I'm just curious, but are they all blank apart from 'N64 ArtSend' shown in the pictures? and was there a 6105 CIC dongle?

 

Yeah, Dinosaur Planet was 512Mbit. There ay be games on these cartridges, all we can do is hope. At least we can hope the memory is still in tact.

 

Those cart contain mostly RAM, the only flash chip most likely contain some sort of firmware. So I'm pretty sure they are volatile cart mean to be used by an PC application to run code.

The flash chip is 28F320 so it's only 4MByte, so we can exclude that this flash chip contain the code to be load in the RAM.

 

F***. You're saying that there's no way these carts could contain game data?

 

Yep, sorry

Their is a SCSI processor and a SCSI connector, so i'm pretty sure those card need a PC application to load code onto them. And at power off everything is gone.

 

******* ..... I thought it was just so Rare could re-write them easier.

 

Maybe this design was also a security precaution...

Shiggsy

 

Given as we saw that Rare cart which needed a hacked home made dongle to work so yeah more than likely the design is a security precaution. Steal their carts? No problem by the time you power it on at home it will be blank so no trade secrets are lost. Steal their software and you have no hardware to load it. Steal both and you need to know how to work it so you are probably right Shiggsy Still... in any case it is a rather nice find and thankyou for sharing

 

that artsend pic is from the acclaim cart thats within the same folder of pictures. Yes there was a 6105 dongles along with 6102.

LeGIt, do you have pics of that? I dont remember ever seeing anything like that but have heard several stories.....

 

I can't remember where I saw it as it was some years ago sorry (I forget my own name, age and d.o.b. too ). It was like a normal retail cart which had the top chopped off and what was probably the cart slot from an N64 motherboard soldered on top. The Rare games wouldn't boot without it.