Western Technologies Sega Mega Drive / Genesis Development Card

Uploaded a Mega Drive ROM file (SH.BIN - Sonic 1) in binary format to the dev card over parallel from the PC.
Ran "SEGALOAD.EXE SH.BIN" and it booted up Sonic right in front of me.
I had no idea it was that easy! Zero Wing also worked, but needed to be converted from SMD to BIN first.
A delightfully unexpected outcome! :smile-new:

Edit: Looks like the debugger works in Windows 3.11 too!

 

x

 

Your PC (and now my PC) made it into Black Mesa (a HL2 mod).
I mean what the hell are the chances of that?
I happen to have a quick game of Black Mesa and find the PC that is sitting in pieces on my kitchen bench!
As for cards we've got a SNASM2, Sega-CD Emulation Card, Gravis UltraSound MAX and some crappy PCI cards.
Very happy to have the SNASM2 working on a Pentium class board!

 

I guess the drivers for the hardware were pretty universal then. I assume you need drivers for interfacing the dev hardware with the PC hardware.

 

Yep! It initialises the card quite painlessly now... How did I miss that setting previously though? :suspicion:
Anyway, the WT card seems to either have some issues somewhere or I am seating it wrong.
I've made a 10 minute video of it glitching out, hanging and being reset only to do it all again!
Turning either the Mega Drive off or the PC off will cause the game to be lost from RAM.
You can perform a hard reset using the command line of course though!
The first sign of trouble was when Sonic turned into an illegal instruction...

 

Seems Sonic has been performing illegal shit from day one. Both law and physics wise...

 

Just wait till you see the video. Green Hill goes underwater at one point. It is scary as all hell! :nightmare:

 

I've added some video to the previous post and here's some more of Sonic glitching out like a madman.
Something mustn't be seated correctly to give these sorts of results...
My favourite parts are where the sound starts missing the correct notes!

Download the software here.
It contains;
- SEGADEV.EXE (SegaDev 3.0) in segadisk.zip
- SEGALOAD.EXE in segadisk.zip
- DEMOCODE.ZIP in segadisk.zip
- SEGADEV3.TXT in segadisk.zip
- segadev-monitor EEPROM Ver 2
- segadev-monitor EEPROM Ver 3

The EEPROM dumps can be flashed onto dev boards to see if they make any difference.
The software above requires a version 3 EEPROM from what I understand.

 

That was funny as hell.

Reminds me of my gameplay last night with Sonic & Knuckles. I used the combined ROM on my EDMD cart. Activated debug mode and started having stuff like this happen. First thing was when I got more than 70 sprites on screen. Caused everything in level to glitch really badly before resetting to S&K only. I still don't know how it manages to do that even to this day since it is a pretty common thing.

 

Looks to me like faulty RAM on the card in the Genesis, I'm guessing you've given the connector a good cleaning. Does it take a while before it starts glitching or happen straight away?

EDIT: Also, Good 'n Healthy PSU in the Genesis?

 

Takes a little while before it starts glitching, but more in the seconds timeframe than minutes. Yep the PSU is always healthy, wealthy and wise (Sorry for the two year delay in getting back to you haha!)

Edit: Fixed all the broken image links above.

 

Are there any other known cards, or was there more than one available from wherever you sourced yours, RetroJunkie?

I'm desperately looking to replace my Cross Products/SNASM2 MegaCD setup with something that's more suitable for pure Genesis development. I can just about get along with it, but it has a lot of quirks trying to get it to run in a Genesis-like mode and I can only use 128kb of ROM space (via a DIP switch which swaps the MCD BIOS location out).

I've been unsuccessful in finding another Western Technologies card, a complete original SNASM setup, or a ZAX unit.

 

Hmmm, sure does take me back. I'm positive it would have been purchased here as a one off (I've since passed it along to @Shad0w relatively recently. I suspect it must have been originally purchased by me off here somewhere, perhaps from @Jackhead, he always has / had cool things and I noticed he has become a moderator! (Congratulations @Jackhead!)

Also I did come across your other thread where you got the Hello World working! Congratulations! Any word on your Sophia yet?

 

Ahh the Sophia has taken a back seat whilst I concentrate on getting my game finished, but I will definitely get around to it.

 

I can't wait! (Especially because I have no more Sophia units!) Keep up the coding though, looking good!

 

You play in 50hz ?

 

I live in 50Hz! I do agree that 60Hz Sonic 1 is much better. Much, much better! I remember the old emulators of the late 1990s playing all the tunes so much more uptempo! It was glorious!

 

I'm pretty sure the original source for a lot of the cool Sega-related dev stuff was Dano2k0 a few years back. He sourced his equipment directly from a former developer. That hardware passed onto Jackhead, Teancum, myself, and probably several other parties I'm not aware of. A large amount of dev hardware came from this single stash, and has been re-circulated over the last couple of years. I don't think I've seen anything "new" in the open market in this time other than some Dreamcast Devkits, and the Sophia systems RetroJunkie had. I've got no idea where they came from, but I don't think it was Dano2k0.

All that said, for dev hardware, it's hard to beat an EverDrive. You can turn around changes really quickly and test it directly on the hardware. I still crack out the Tototek flashcart every now and then when I need to run code directly without a boot loader. For hardware debugging, you can't beat a logic analyzer. Even if it is a bit slow and inconvenient, the results are definitive.

 

Ah yes, one Sophia came from Japan. Two from Europe somewhere, they had 220V PSUs installed. Dano2k0 was kind enough to supply my some SH-2 cards to get the incomplete Japanese Sophia working which was amazing kind (for a price of course). Overall though, these units are all in the hands of people who can utilise them much better than I ever could have!

* Hugs EverDrive * - One day I'll be a coder... one day!

 

The 220v Sophias came from myself (I can't reveal the source, I'm sorry), and were used as part of a superb swap deal with Dano2k0 for my SNASM2 kit and a few other bits.

I've not seen him active since the death of a family member a year or so back. He even lived 30 mins away from me, met him in person a few times, cool guy.

The only other kit I've seen since was from the Psygnosis (Sony Liverpool) shutdown. A full working PsyQ kit! It's being used for active development by this guy: http://www.psycatic.com/psycatic/index.cfm