Sega Dreamcast Kata Dev Kit Pics and specific software

Hi, I was wondering if someone who owns a Sega Dreamcast Kata Dev Kit wouldn't mind posting some pictures of it. I'm particularly interested in what the back looks like and the inside of if if possible. If not no worries, just was curious.

Also is there a program that will let me explore a .cdi file (particularity a Dreamcast .cdi) and let me know if its been patch with an auto loader (or anything else) and let me remove it to install my own? I'm also looking for a auto loader, I downloaded binhack32 1.0.0.0.3 from this site (Cant find it again for the life of me) but I'm not sure if that's an auto loader or not. I have a hand full of Dreamcast .cdi's that wont boot and just wanted to determine what the problem may be.

Well that's it and thanks for reading my post.

 

Coincidentally someone has just put a couple of pics of their new Katana recently

http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?49733-Just-Got-A-Sega-Katana

lots more of other peoples dev machines around the site

as for your .cdi enquiry I think -=FamilyGuy=- has posted lots of useful stuff in the past regarding this kind of thing.

 

There are multiple versions of the dev kit too, some being a pci card that goes into a pc. I'm sure I've seen pictures of internals before but I cannot remember which thread. If I find them I'll link it.

 

Whoa, whoa, whoa...You mean to tell me that there's a devkit specifically for the PC that runs off a pci slot? I'm assuming it would run a ribbon cable from your pc to the devkit or something along those lines? You would need the katana devkit as well for the pci device to function? Its not just a stand alone item is it?

 

The Set 2 dev kit, it was a prototype using non-final hardware and had worse performance, the latest dev unit being the Set 5.24. http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...-Dreamcast-quot-Katana-quot-Dev-SDK-Revisions

 

Just found a picture of the Set 2 dev kit. Its really a pci card. Wish they would've kept up with the pci cards rather then the dev kits. Thanks for the info. Hopefully some will post pics of what the inside of a actual dev kit looks like.

 

The "Set 2" card technically isn't a Dreamcast devkit at all. Sega gave it this name to make their own development easier, but its correct name is the NEC PWH-6032, and it's an evaluation board for the ARC1A PowerVR graphics chip developed by NEC (The "A" being a revision, so there was an ARC1 that preceeded it). This board was created by NEC alone, so that companies like Sega could evaluate the graphics chip and decide if they wanted to license it for use in their own hardware. It would have been shopped around to other manufacturers of the era, with Sega being the only known company to pick it up. The "ARC1" designation indicates they were thinking of the arcade industry when they created it. The board is an entirely PC-based graphics card, with a Windows display driver and an NEC-produced graphics API called "Kamui". Sega R&D got a hold of this card and started developing their own graphics API for it called "Ninja", which existed as early as 1996, although this would predate the actual selection of the ARC1A graphics chip from NEC. There would have been a number of these cards possessed by the Sega R&D department, and various close development partners and selected programming teams within Sega might have bought from NEC or been sent by Sega R&D their own versions of these cards for early testing and evaluation.

Sega obviously decided they liked what they saw with the ARC1, but they wanted NEC to make some modifications. They entered into a contract with NEC, and got them to produce the CLX1 (which appears to have always been intended as a "stepping stone", with some but not all of the requested features), and then the CLX2, which was the actual graphics chip used in the Dreamcast. The documentation in the "Katana" SDK provides a lot of info about the functional differences between each of these graphics chips.

 

Apparently, according to Wikipedia, there was a pc version of the clx2. The Series 2 NEC powerVR chipset for the DC was clocked at 100mhz while the pc powerVR 250PC was clocked at 125mhz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerVR_products

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/videologic-neon-250-review,131.html

Here I was talking about building my own dreamcast from an old pentium 3 pc...
http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...-bios-dreamcast-OS-and-a-dreamcast-hard-drive

Wonder if the patent for the video card is up. I saw people building open source video cards and judging by the shear simplicity of the card I don't think it would be too hard to duplicate with today's technology.

 

Good luck finding a Neon 250, I've been on the lookout for over a year. The cards are very rare, and unfortunately in the "want list" for many graphics card collectors, so expect to pay a fortune for one if you ever see it. I'm after one so that when I eventually turn my focus on the Dreamcast/Naomi for emulation, I'll be able to reverse-engineer and document the entire line of early PVR graphics chips. The chip isn't compatible with the Dreamcast though, there are a number of key feature differences between them. Also note the PowerVR hardware is rather unique. They used a tile-based render process, and a fundamentally different render pipeline than any other 3D hardware of the day. These differences are actually critical, since they affect in particular the way blending operations (transparency) work. The hardware basically eliminated fill rate limitations, and removed the need for software-based hidden surface removal or back to front sorting of transparent surfaces, something that we still don't get on any modern hardware today. This makes high level emulation rather challenging, since you can't just throw the same raw primitives at a modern graphics card and get the same result where transparency is involved, you now need to add software-based polygon sorting where the PowerVR hardware took care of that for you.

 

Interesting. Thanks for clarifying that. I could never figure out why emulation was so difficult given the fact that video cards of modern computers blow the consoles we're trying to emulate out of the water. I learned something new today.