Hi Assembler! Have you seen something like this before? It's got SFC adaptor on top connected to stacked PCB housing on bottom via SCSI cable. Dates written on chips are 1993 and 1994. There are EEPROMS too. I have asked friends but nobody can identify. Maybe someone here can help.
It would be some sort of prototyping cart. Looks similar to this: These kinds of carts were also used for the Campus Challenge and Powerfest 94 competition carts.
Bottom piece looks like an external SCSI 50PIN enclosure for a HDD. But the cable is going outside the case out the back, so Nintendo is just making use of the SCSI bus for some reason. I'm pretty sure to access this you would need the external 50PIN SCSI cable attached to a PC's SCSI port and a terminator on the SCSI port. Any of this era's Nintendo development equipment have SCSI ports? I know zero about Nintendo Development equipment.
Yeah, it's better to cover those with thick black tape. But it's not EEPROM, which means Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory. It's EPROM which can only be erased by UV light. P.S. It's a cartridge emulator.
looks like a CD-rom addon of sorts, the removable panel looks about the right size for a CD-ROM drive and would fit in with the design maybe its the other half of the sony-nintendo playstation enterprise would be good to get some better pictures to help identify it, does it do anything when plugged into a famicom?
It isn't a CD-ROM drive, what would make you think that? It is a non-standard dev cart that has been used for development of games like Donkey Kong Country and the competition carts. It happens to be connected to some sort of cartridge emulator, as mentioned in another post.
well it has a molex connector as used for hard drives or CD-ROM drives, the removable panel seems to be designed to house a CD rom rather than a HDD drive based on the size and there appears to be space for a IDE cable on the back of the board for a HDD/CDROM drive. maybe it was just a external CD-rom drive shell re-purposed for some dev hardware, but the fact the power cable is left in there and there is a removable panel suggests it was primarily the dev hardware with the option of having a CD-rom drive attached. could be completely off, but that was just what i though it looked like, but as i said, more pictures would probably help identify parts etc
Yes, Nintendo dev machines often include a SCSI-looking connector. The pin-out may be different from the usual variety, though. GDEV has one too, provided with the development set, for connecting to the ODEM PCI card. The DDH did too, although I think the cables aren't interchangeable between the two, due to the nature of their setup (DDH did optical disk emulation from the included hard drive, unlike the GDEV that did it from the host computer's filesystem/HDD) This device may have provided a way to run code (and maybe debugging) on a SNES/SFC directly from a PC, for development purposes, without the burden of writing to a flash cart first.
Hard to tell from the rather fuzzy photos, but I have to cast my vote for it being a custom cartridge emulator - it looks like the probe bit that plugs into the SFC has been recycled from some official Nintendo PROM cart, but modified (the immediately noticeable thing is that the cable doesn't really seem to fit the openings in the housing). The "CD drive case" section looks like an off-the-shelf single-board computer plugged into a custom baseboard - my guess is that the 2 Hitachi chips on the baseboard are SRAMs used to hold the cart image and that Fulitsu chip near to them with the oscillator is a SCSI target controller. The only slightly disturbing thing is that empty PLCC socket - I just hope the missing part isn't something important...
A video recently surfaced showing inside Nintendo's offices during the SNES era. I think I saw this device a few times - The video (which you may have already seen) -
