A friend of mine received a few of these units recently through an ebay auction as was kind enough to give me one. Also in the auction was a proto of an unreleased GB/C RTS, which leads me to believe that these units are somehow development-related, but I have no way to be sure. I cannot boot the unit because the cable seems to be interfacing with the unit's power source directly, removing the components that would allow it to boot on batteries (and I do not have an AC adapter for it) I have no idea if this indeed dev hardware or some kind of mod, but if anyone has seen anything like this before, please fill me in!
Can't seem to find it now but some months back I remember seeing a similar CGB Dev unit in an ebay auction along with some other dev stuff. From what I recall you couldn't power the system normally, it had to go through that cable to some device (that was included in that auction) although I can't remmeber what it was. At any rate - I'm 99.9% sure that's a dev unit.
The molex connector appears to provide power and perhaps sound output. Since four wires are the only visible modification, I agree with karsten. There's nothing to suggest that this is a "development" piece.
I agree with your analysis, though I'm wondering what purpose such a modification would serve (the audio is confusing, as the unit has a jack for that).
In a display kiosk, it would be necessary to power the GB without using batteries. Perhaps the GBC needs two voltages: 1.5V and 3V (hence four wires). I suggested sound because it's the only feasible thing to output on two wires I could think of.
If it was a demo unit they might not want customers adjusting the volume. This does remind me of my demovision. Which had 2 b&w gameboys and that was used for development.
Gameboys used in Wideboy applications output controller signals or audio/video signals. Two of the wires are for power. You can't output the controller or video signals on two wires. (Gameboys have digital screens of course)
I dunno if I still have it. It was huge monster rectangular unit. You connect what look like 2 normal b&w gameboys to it and can play the gameboys on the TV.
It could still be dev related. Two wires are going near the CPU. I think it could be wired to generate a NMI at will. The NMI handler will pass execution to a debug handler that might send debug info to screen or serial link.
While its a different unit, this looks awfully like my SNSYS Gameboy Advance. They basically used retail GBA's and ran the power off the interface kit, and directly into the back of the GBA, removing the innards of the battery clamshell. did SNSYS ever build GBC devklits? tubo
yes I got a couple of them. but as I said I havn't seen the inside of them.. but I think it's one of them edit: ops. missread it as intelligent systems
Howdy! I'm the one who managed to score this particular auction. If I get time tommrow, I'll dig up the pic of the GB flash cart that came with it and the video I took of it (the video isn't very good, I'm holding my Cell Phone recording from my TV through the GameBoy Player...) Anywhoo, the thought had crossed my mind that these were store demo units, but it seems odd to go through the effort of rewiring them when there's already a power jack and an audio jack on them... But who knows?
The only thing I can think of is for those two wires to enable some sort of bootloader mode where code can be loaded into RAM over the serial port. But I doubt the z80 has any room to spare cost-wise.
Babu - this is the unit (not exact as I don't think it was yours) I was describing above that I saw on eBay some months back.
