Unknown Sega PCI card

Hello,

A few months ago, there was an auction on Yahoo Japan for an unknown Sega PCI board with SCSI connector & VGA output:

[GALLERY=media, 2241]P1000010 by T_chan posted Aug 10, 2017 at 9:38 AM[/GALLERY]
[GALLERY=media, 2242]P1000011 by T_chan posted Aug 10, 2017 at 9:38 AM[/GALLERY]


Has anyone seen this yet / know what they were used for ?

references: Sega 1997, 837-13338, 171-7595A.

Looking at the reference & the year, it was the period of the DC dev kits & arcade stuff:
eg. 1997 SET5 GDROM INTERCONNECTOR BOARD (171-7590D)
eg. 837-13342: Security Board for Zero Gunner all versions
If somebody knows where I could find an exhaustive list of sega ref. numbers, that would help too...

 

would you sell that pci i would like to see what it does

 

I have absolutely no idea what this really is but I'm guessing it's an interface card of some sort for the Katana Dev kit (see above avatar.)

 

I knew this kind of question would come
Sorry, the card is not for sale.

My guess is also in this direction, but it's from 1997 + it has VGA output, so I'm guessing it could have been used in the early stages of DC development (a pre-ARC1 card ?) ... or something completely different....

Oh, and the SCSI connector is in fact of the female type, exactly like the "Connector I/O" one on a Set5 devkit, or the "cont.box" connector on a Set4....

Btw, 171-7598B = Set 4 motherboard... it would be nice if they followed the numbering:
171-7595 = Set 1 ?
171-7596 = Set 2 ?
171-7597 = Set 3 ?
171-7598 = Set 4
... but I'm dreaming here.... ^_^

 

may be a NAOMI Dev Card ?

Or something linked to Naomi hardware

 

may be we could find out if we have sdks r1 to r8 and we could find out someone may have old sdks for the older kits should give lots of info

 

no sh4s on the card or gpu ....

 

As far as I know Altera had a line of RAID controllers out there, from which this can be the controller that was used in the Katana dev kit and got lost somewhere ending up alone in a auction.
The only thing that I find strange is the VGA out, maybe it's not a VGA and used as some sort of COM port? especially because it looks like it has not got any gpu's on the board.
So best guess here is a katana dev kit pci card to connect some external GD-ROM writer or whatever.

 

that VGA port is indeed a VGA port, something you connect a monitor to...

 

I think people know what VGA is for but thanks for pointing out it's to connect to a monitor
Looking at the underside of the board actually confirms (didn't do that before) 15 pins DB-15 where a serial connection would have only 9.

 

Hmmm... I also thought of the Sophia system, but from the few pictures of the sophia cards I've found on the net, the technology used on those cards looks much older than this card...
ST-V appeared in 1995, so it would be a little bit strange for Sega to release a pci card for this system in 1997... but it could match the 2MB ram - 1,5MB vram configuration (see the extra facts hereunder)

Also, the VGA connector is connected to a Conexant chip (Bt121KPJ80), which is a is a Video DAC - 24bit color @80MHz.

Some extra facts:
- the two fpga's count some 10.000 & 16.000 gates,
- there's 2 x MByte Edo RAM, connected to 6x256kbyte fieldbuffers

 

just because it's a DB-15 port doesnt mean it has to be a VGA port. DB ports can be used for a myriad of things.


check for FPGAs.

Altera Flex are programmable logic chips, which could mean there's something there you can't recognize because it's not in its final mass production form. IE you could have a video chip in there or a couple. The VGA port might indicate as much.

 

i think so its a vga port because it got a conexant chip witch is a used on pc graphic cards i think it a Early Development Kit for dreamcast i am not to sure

 

the DB15 has its middle row as grounds with the unused pin left unconnected (or possibly tied to 5V), and on the other side of the board you can see stuff in nice 3x quantities.... this and the Video DAC are enough to safely say that the connector is for video.

 

guss what i had a email saying when i bought a other dev kit on saturday he is send something like in the picture i will see if its the same thing i will let you all know

 

could be something related to saturn2/saturn-add on or pre-katana??

 

At this stage, any suggestion is welcome

Just connected the card to an old Win98jp pc - as expected, nothing appeared on the monitor. The card was recognised as a PCI Multimedia device, but without driver, it remains uninstalled...

 

we have seen katana set4 motherboards from 1997, so it is quite possible this piece of hardware is dreamcast/naomi related.