Sega Mega CD development unit arrives

worth every penny and more of what you paid for the unit though, but i thought i saw the boxes go to someone else. Did you get some kind of card for the PC end? I don't have a manual for it, just the manuals for the normal md & snes bits... I'm looking forward to scans of yours should you do them

:ramen ​

 

Thats no dev. machine, Its a Space Station.....

 

I give hats off to you, ive been waiting so long to see what a sega.mega cd unit looks like in detail, even then i consider it one of the holy grails to own, i was wondering if you were going to post pictures of the rest of the dev kit?

 

sh3-rg posted pics of his not that long ago, ya know

 

btw, I'm pretty sure WRPR stands for Write Protect, which most likely write protects the CD being emulated by the SCSI HDD.

 

I don't think it's write protect because there are two LEDs, one for each CPU and write protecting a CPU doesn't make sense.

I have a feeling this is going to be one of those consoles I'll buy in X years and find out everyone was completely wrong about it.

Assem, need manual scans, "sandwich" board scans/pics and pics of the CD emulator.

Also did Cross make the In circuit emulator/RAM cart?

 

Ahh but thats no good, you could be careful. That board hasn't been revealed, you could be the first on the 'net and it could spark some more technical discussion.

 

I cant blame assembler though, it is very hard to find one of these developmetn kits, and the fact is is that there is no replacement readily avalible if he breaks it, i myself could only dream of owning one of these things (also due to the fact that it is region free, and this can be confirmed by reading the ultimate history of videogames by steven l kent as he talks about how how developers that were translating games had sepcial sega cds that were region free(which im guess he is talking about the dev kit). I also belive that sega of america still has some sega cd dev kits lying around as i belive the guy who use to own and run sonic cult mentioned that he had saw one at work (when he was a member of the first board), though it might have been another assembler member who saw this. I wish nintendo was a bit more laid back about letting its dev and beta stuff get out, i can only imagine the types of games they canceled or how they were different in dev(this is most evident in the first shots and ad for mario 64, star fox 64, and infamously zelda oot.

 

Well heres the thing, there CANT be a region free Sega/Mega CD. The BIOS can support one single region. It's very possible for Cross to have modified a few BIOS to make a bankswitching ROM, but it's not very possible for Cross being a third party developer to create and be licensed an entirely new "region free" BIOS. Also this is a Cross unit, it's make by Cross/Psygnosis/SN Systems in the UK, it's only but one of several licensed development systems, it's not SOA's inhouse prized hardware (which likely is bankswitched as well) It's very well Pachuka (that's who you are talking about right?) saw one of these at Sega when they were back in San Fran but a multi (key word) system is pretty common.

 

Yes that is the member i am talking about( didnt bother mentioning name due to fact that he at one point changed his name for sonic cult) the thing is though is your right there is no such thing as a region free sega cd, what i forgot to mention was the fact that in the book he mentions how those bios for those kits were in fact modified bios and not standard ones, is the sega cd the only system(or add on i should say) that uses such an odd way of determining the region through boot code being mixed with regular code(if i have it wrong please correct me as im a bit confused on how the sega cd checks for region, i do know though it has to do something with the size of the boot code being bigger on american games and shorter on japanese games thus having the code off slightly and that is why scdconv doesnt work on all games).

 

I'm not sure sure what other consoles use the same method, likely none. I've never used SCDConv, nor have I patched a game with another tool so I don't know. I've never had to convert a game

 

I took mine to bits & it went back together fairly easiy. I can do it again & take some pictures of the middle board if you think it's worth doing, but please don't slag me off for not being an expert photographer & having a cheapy camera

 

I would really appreciate it! Any pics are better than none and I'm sure it's a highly easy disassembly/reassembly compared to a N64 analog stick.

 

That's a lean mean Gaming machine! what is that about SNES? can it play snes too or something?

 

Here's some big ugly pictures:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sh3-rg/stuph/mcdev/mcdev.html

All back together now

 

They're great pics though, some names are illegible but thats fine.

The first thing I noticed was that the BIOS, to my surprise, doesn't appear to be bankswitched (no wire visible from top). It's possible for it to be bankswitched from the bottom of the board. Unless there is a mod there, either the system isn't multiregion or it is and Cross managed to develop their own magic BIOS which I will be skeptical of until I get a copy of it.

One thing I'd like to know is which expansion devices ("boxes") are literally tied to this device? I understand that there is a CDROM emulator box, and it's clear that the system has
a DB25 port ("SCSI") but is that for computer connectivity or what? There is an incircuit emulator box right? Where does that connect to the unit? Assem, you mentioned a RAM cart? Is this specifically for this Cross unit or just a 68K SNASM ROM emulator?

 

That definetly looks nice, but i could see why its a bit hard to open up, i meanlook it how the boards are stacked and all the chips, im also gusing that thats a U.S. dev kit since the top is a genesis casing. Im wondering what chip goes in the the empty slot for the 1st and 2nd board.

 

I believe Sega were so impressed with Cross that they bought them and they then made the OFFICIAL sega dev units. I'm not sure at what stage this happened, though - I believed it was around 1996/97

 

Assembler,
Now I can actually reveal the company it is coming from. It is INTERPLAY. (as all my other dev items)
Actually it makes this beast even cooler when you know how many games were developed on it. I am happy that it arrived safe and sound.