dev cart used by Westwood Studios

dev cart used by Westwood Studios
by Memblers on 2011-05-07 (#77817)

http://cgi.ebay.com/Original-Nintendo-NES-Development-Kit-One-Kind-/110681980852?pt=Video_Games&hash=item19c528ffb4=

Looks like a ROM emulator, it also says "Program" and "Character" by those memory chips so maybe was made for use on NES. I see "Ten.." on it (can't see the rest) so I'd speculate it's a Tengen board. Who knows. Looks like it used an Atari ST to control it, it's rewired to a DB25 parallel port though and looks like it had a lot of mods done to it.

Too bad it won't be usable without the software for it, pretty interesting to see though.

by Drag on 2011-05-07 (#77818)

So who's springing for this?

by 3gengames on 2011-05-07 (#77819)

Not me. I don't think it's worth $100 myself. There's not even anything prototype here besides the board. Very cool, but just not anything to me.

by koitsu on 2011-05-07 (#77820)

Stuff I can make out, though in no particular order:

Top left:

What looks like "PROG" and "Protected", unsure

Top:

??? ??? ??? for 64K bytes

Top right:

PROG RAM/???
SELECTS
(16 ????)
-----------
SRAM <dipswitch>
EPROM <dipswitch>

Bottom left:

Char RAM/???
SELECTS (8 ???)
<dipswitch> EPROM ??256 (??Kx8)
<dipswitch> ??? 256 (32Kx8)

Bottom right:

RESET

Also see some readings on one of the main PCBs that read "ATARI ST CART SLOT" and "HP ??? ANALYZER".

What a super weird device.

Really appreciate this part of the auction text though:

Quote:
My video game experience starts and stops at playing them. ... I set the reserve fairly high because I do not mind if it has to sit in my garage for another 10 years before I get a good price.

*sigh*

by Banshaku on 2011-05-07 (#77822)

Yeah that last quote was kind of "eww" but I guess we cannot do anything about it unfortunately. <sarcasm>It's ebay after all </sarcasm>.

by 3gengames on 2011-05-07 (#77823)

Maybe somebody will buy it and issue a defective item claim. Ebay would totally refund the money, no doubt.

by Memblers on 2011-05-08 (#77826)

koitsu wrote:
Quote:
My video game experience starts and stops at playing them. ... I set the reserve fairly high because I do not mind if it has to sit in my garage for another 10 years before I get a good price.

*sigh*

Yeah, because it's so much more valuable after the EPROM(s) lose their data, heh. But I suppose in reality, the software to control it remotely is probably 'backed up' to a floppy disk somewhere, which is even less likely to be readable by now.

3gengames: Yeah, I suppose so. Seller probably should have sold it "as-is", and not categorized as "good condition".

Price is already far beyond what I would pay for it.

by Drag on 2011-05-08 (#77831)

Memblers wrote:
Price is already far beyond what I would pay for it.

Especially when you can get a copynes which does the same thing.

I wonder if a lot of that hardware was for some kind of debugging capability. When I'm developing NES software, I usually just use fceux's debugger. What would they have used back in the day?

by tepples on 2011-05-08 (#77844)

In much the same way that I developed Lockjaw Tetromino Game for Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS: develop hardware-independent portions of the game on a personal computer with the same CPU and port it. Back in the day they might have developed units of the game logic for Apple, Atari, or Commodore 8-bit computers using their native debuggers, and then just rewritten certain parts of the graphics engine for the NES. I seem to remember an NES game's music engine being ported from a C64 music engine; they forgot to eliminate one of the SID port writes.

By the Super NES era, they had rudimentary emulators on the Mac (Mirage, which became Silhouette).

by 3gengames on 2011-05-08 (#77853)

I remember reading that they had an Atari emulator. [Possibly Activision?] And they said it wasn't very accurate at all, but it worked.

by Jagasian on 2011-05-08 (#77863)

Definitely an interesting piece of history. I've never seen such a structured dev kit for the NES before. The SNES, on the other hand, had several commercial dev kits.