Sega Saturn Dev Kit Surfaced On Ebay

Ah, now that is a big Dev kit. I stand corrected.

 

Beautiful... n.n

 

Wow, that is a crazy design, the top of an actual Saturn case lies beneath the box. Any info you might be able to give on this unit and what all special things it does over a standard dev unit or cart dev?

 

I think it pretty much was!

Yeah... I get that a lot

...see?

It's an address checker, used for debugging. Basically, it shows where the running code is trying to access illegal RAM.

 

Ah awesome. So its just like the Playstation debug units but way more complicated right?

 

It's a SEGA thing - they have a technical requirement that your code doesn't touch any memory outside the areas that are specified in the development documentation, and they will fail your title if you do. The address checker includes extra hardware that detects these illegal accesses and displays them on the attached PC.

Otherwise, it's exactly the same as a retail unit - even to the point where you need to use a system disc to boot CD-Rs on it.

There was a later version that was built into a regular Saturn case and had a row of LEDs on the top panel (one for each unmapped memory area) - this was much more convenient to use, since you didn't need the PC connected, although I understand it didn't provide as much information about what the problem was.

The other difference with the old address checker was that it used the same CPU boards as the Sophia box, so you could in theory unplug one of the CPUs (generally CPU 0) and replace it with the target probe for the Hitachi SH-2 in-circuit emulator (the external unit is also in that photo with "E7000" on it - I can't see the pod, but it might be inside the Sophia).

 

I mean, since it's basically just a retail Saturn with a few extra features like Trimesh said, why is it so much bigger than a retail Saturn? This thing makes Gamecube NPDP-GDEV units and Xbox alpha units look compact by comparison.

 

x

 

It was probably easier to use a pre-fabricated disc chamber than coming up with and tooling one themselves. As per usual with dev kits, it's effectively a big, fairly plain metal enclosure.