Sega Megadrive Address Checker: Formerly "Unknown PCB"

Come on guys, where are your standards? These are nice photographs but it's a very very simple QA tool. It halts the CPU on an illegal memory access and has some blinky lights... big deal!

Attraction--actual dev tool, maybe a software debugger
Sex appeal--actual dev tool with a hardware emulator that can debug retail games

 

I'm so hot right now.

 

Wow... that is a piece of history. Sorry, Calpis - I know it's not sexy, but I was a game tester at Sega of America from 1992-1995 and I wasn't sure if any of these even survived so it's pretty amazing for me to see one again. You should have seen the bug reports we used to have to write when an address checker bug came up - it wasn't just the first code, but EVERY code the thing would spit out, plus you had to detail all the steps it took to get the bug to occur in the first place. I remember reports where a single address checker bug could take up an entire printed page, if not more. Anyway, great find whoever found it and enjoy it - even if you can't really do anything with it, mostly because our testing was so darn airtight back then.

 

Hey, sorry to bug you with this kind of question, but I'm very interested in what other development or testing hardware for the Mega Drive you may have encountered or heard of in your time in Sega.

We're aware of the Cross Products MegaCD Dev unit:

http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/massive-sega-mega-cd-devkit-lot-very-pic-heavy.36936/

We're aware of the ZAX ICE unit:
http://www.x-cult.org/cat/15/Genesis - Megadrive/94/ZAX_Megadrive_Dev/

We're aware of the 32x CartDev system:
http://www.andysarcade.net/personal/cartdev/index.htm

We're aware of the Psygnosis 32x Dev system:


We're aware of the Western Technologies Sega Dev flash cart:


And as of this thread, we're now aware of the Address Checker. Did you happen to see or hear about any other hardware while you were working there? In particular, did you ever hear about something that may have been called the "Super Mega Drive" or "Super Target"? I've got documentation that uses these names, which seem to describe hardware we've never seen. Also, any hardware for any other systems you may have seen would also be interesting to hear about.

 

Its always cool to see unusual dev/testing gear from back in the day.
I bet the big thing with the label on it is some sort of FPGA or other similar device.