the SNES Emulator SE worshipping thread

today is a special day!
finally, i was able to get ahold of an official snes devkit, the snes emulator se.
although this may seem trivial to some of you, ive been trying to obtain one of these for the longest time.
to celebrate this very special occurrence, i've taken the chance and did some pictures of the units insides and...
well, see for yourself.






cpu board: stock cpu, wram, 2 ppus and vram, scsi interface


sound board: spc700+dsp, ram, midi interface


rom emulator board: 8mbit ram(32mbit max), dsp1, obc1


special video board with vga out(no idea what its used for exactly)


additional ram for the video board


the xilinx cplds are most likely used for realtime debugging.

basically, theres a "main board" that provides power and the a and b bus and you plug the various extension boards seen above into this mainboard.
there are two additional unused slots, these can for example be used to add super fx support and such.

ive got the software and am waiting to receive the scsi interface card, should arrive next week.

 

Nice info :thumbsup:! I'm guessing you were the one who won it on eBay not too long ago.

I'm guessing the sound board has more to do with the SPC-700 chip? I've heard emulation of the SPC-700 was not near perfect. Maybe one of these could bridge the gap between poor and near perfect SPC coding! ;-)

Thanks for sharing!

 

nope, this was a private deal.
however, i got the software from the seller of that auction you mentioned.

yeah, maybe running some timing test on this unit will yield something useable.

 

uuuh i adore you!!!

looks awesome, and also funny how you worshipped it

 

:lol: that picture has me rolling,awesome stuff congrat's on the purchase.

 

give to me! heh, I think I would done the same if I ever buy one my self
and really nice of you to take pictures of it.

 

Curious...would the VGA port allow you to play a ROM on a VGA monitor? What happens when you plug in a monitor? Any display?

-hl718

 

:lol: I love the worship pictures Hahahaha. I noticed they were taken at night though :-( Show your love to the people ofg your town ray:

Yakumo

 

WOW, that is truly amazing. I've always wanted to see what's inside one of those. Awesome grab.

Um, are you worshipping in the middle of the street?

 

didnt want to wait until the next day to take the pics.

its a custom port (connector similar to a pcs rs232 serial port), not vga.
i'll try to find out the pinout next week.
most likely, it outputs debugging information, not the snes' video.

 

Know if the RAM board is HiROM friendly? The first thing I'd do is buy 628128s for it

 

That's to bad It would be awesome to have hi-res snes on your monitor!

 

I have seen no other console dev kit as old as the SNES Emu SE, that is as cool as the SNES Emu SE. I am really jelous, as I have been wanting one of these for over a year now. I have bid on every auction that ended up on Ebay, but somebody always bids a lot lot more

It is nice to see one of these end up in somebody's hands, who will do it justice and document the hell out of it, take detailed pictures of everything, reverse engineer everything etc. Please spread the PC-side software around. It will help more people reverse engineer stuff.

Have you gotten it to work yet? What have you been able to make it do so far? Can you even get it to run a commercial SNES game? You say it has both DSP1 and OBC1. What is the version of the DSP1 chip? 1, 1A, or 1B? The OBC1 chip would make it be able to run some commercial games that no other copier is capable of running, right?

Is your SE fully outfitted? I heard some did just sound, others just tiles, and others still did ICE debugging. Can you find compatible RAM chips to max out the RAM? I see lots of empty sockets.

 

welcome to the club.
there are always people with seemingly endless cash to blow, its a pity.

you already have it, dont you?

no. as i said, im still waiting for the scsci cart, cable and terminator to arrive.
its a socketed dsp1, can be swapped easily.
theres a spot to solder the obc1 to, but its not equipped with one currently.
figured out the pinout of the custom analog rgb port on the extra video board:

1=GND
2=VCC/+5V
3=R
4=G
5=B
6=NC
7=NC
8=Composite-Sync
9=V-Sync

doesnt output more than the normal multi out, a solid black synced screen(like a snes in reset state).
however, all boards seem to power up fine and my guess is that it first has to be initialized through the pc-software in order to display anything.
i'm pretty confident i'll have it working sooner or later, although i havent heard from anybody who managed to do that yet(apart from the official developers back in the days of course).
the reason most likely is that the software is only available since the most recent ebay auction.

its fully outfitted in the sense of: has all the standard pcbs(cpu, audio, rom emu, video board + ram extension).
apart from that, its probably the low-end configuration:
8mbit rom-emu ram, no sram, no obc1.
i will upgrade it as much as possible, of course, although i doubt i'll ever use the obc1 for anything meaningful.

apart from that, there are expansion boards to support the super fx according to a guy at funcom.(they did winter gold)
sadly, all their emulator se units were trashed when they werent needed anymore.

my guess is that there are add-on boards for the sa-1 aswell.

i'm afraid chances of us being able to obtain such a board will be very slim, considering how scarce the normal emulator se units are already.

maybe assembler has some of these in the lot he got from that acclaim auction. =)
didnt get a response from him when i asked about the matter earlier, though.

 

It's a pity how developers trash their hardware used.

 

yeah, its a shame, really.
almost makes me wanna cry every time i think about it.
but wait, tough guys dont cry!
damn.

anyway, check this out:
http://rpgd.emulationworld.com/fh/pages/se_requium.html

 

The pic there looks like it was close to being dead anyway :lol:! Oh well, maybe it's part of a developer's contract to trash their dev hardware/software; I praise those few who still keep them over the years.

 

Yeah, i've smashed a few dev kits in my day... But i've also managed to save a few. That damn Xbox Alpha 2 got what it deserved tho. It thought i was kidding when i brought out the sledgehammer, but once it was taken out to the parkinglot it tried to run away. We did give it a blindfold and a cigeratte. I cut out it's bios and use it as my keychain. Damn contractual agreements. Funny how that after that Live BETA xbox was smashed, it seemed to turn into a standard 64 meg ram retail motherboard... That might explain the live BETA that i own.

 

Until I get my own, I'll just stare at your pics and the other pics that other owners have posted on the net. Maybe they will give me more courage to bid higher, and then skimp elsewhere to make up for the spent cash.

RGB422 offerred me a copy, for the PDF version of the SNES Dev manual. I have the TIF version, but he never responded. I assume that means I'll never get a copy from him. Here is the thread where other people and I watched the last SE auction on Ebay. I bid, something $481 USD:
http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&item=8231686737

Why would they destroy the dev kits. I understand there might be issues with EULAs and NDAs, but you'd figure the fact that these sell for $350 to $500 on Ebay would encourage more sales and less destruction. If you could score add-on boards for every cart co-processor, you would have an uber copier, assuming you wrote some nice custom PC-side software to easily feed games to the SE. How much SRAM can it be outfitted with? The 32Mb limit will make the SE incompatible with one SFC game, and there is at least one game, AFAIK, that uses 1Mb of SRAM. There is also a game that uses a real-time clock. Anyway, I hope the public sees these co-processor addon boards someday.

The SE's BIOS has already been dumped, right? In the pics, it looks like there are at least two ROMs in the SE. Are you going to dump them both? You never know how many BIOS revisions there are.

Please post more pics and stuff when you get everything working. My only fear is that once it is demonstrated that the SE is more than a paperweight, that is, you demonstrate exactly what is needed to get it fully functional and playing commercial ROMs... the value of these is going to skyrocket. Oh and wasn't the SE made by the same development company that makes the Fire Emblem and Nintendo Wars games (e.g. Advance Wars)? That puts two official popular brand names on the SE, further increasing its desirability.

Like I said, I am very jealous right now.

 

I think that people should start calling this the "SNESESE" and pronounce it sneseeze or snesies because writing "SNES Emulator SE" takes too much effort, but apparently the name is already taken by a software based SNES emulator, so maybe we can call it the "snesies"? Anyway, do you think that there is a chance that the snesies supports ICE trace debugging of the DSP1 and other co-processors (assuming you have the addon boards for them)? Just imagine how much such a thing would help emulator development. I realize that emulation of the DSP1 has recently started to approach perfection, but even for that it would have been much nicer to have an in-circuit emulator for trace debugging the DSP1 to reverse engineer it. Imagine what such a thing would do for FX emulation.