I was out in town today and stopped by a local game store I haven't been to in a while. I was digging through they're SNES games and came across this really odd cartridge. I asked the store owner about it and he said he had got a bunch of trades and that it was included in the lot, and had no idea what it was. I went ahead and bought it and looked online and can't find any information on what it is, or where it came from. It has Chip Level Designs Super NES Art Downloader typed on the label with Serial #: NA74 written on it, also has a connector on the back with a small adapter that attaches to it. I have included pictures of it.  Please let me know if any of you guys have seen one of these, know what it is, or what it might have been used for. 

Sure is pretty.

Anything come up when you put in it a SNES?

Looks like a device for uploading graphics from their computers on which the artists work. They did this to get a better look of their art on the SNES screen, since you can do stuff like alternate pixels and get more colors, they had to see what it'd look like. Probably what that's for IMO. Great find! Hopefully it works, or somebody could dump it if you'd let the Nolans or somebody do it.

Definitely a development cart of some sort. Have you even tried to play it on your snes, that might be the only way to find out what it is.

That is cool as all get out. It seems like a development tool to me.

Serial #: NA74 - That must belong to Nintendoage member number 74.

NICE!
another neat find from Washington state.

I didn't get home till late last night and haven't had a chance to try it out, but i'll stick it in the SNES today and see what happens.

amazing why cant i find shit like this

Well this would seem the most likely thing this cart was used for.  I went ahead and plugged it in the SNES by itself to see what it did.  It appears to work, but all i seem to get is an odd color bar screen.  I would imagine i need to plug it in to a computer to get it to do what it was designed for. If anyone has any ideas on how to use it let me know. I attached a screenshot for anyone curious about the color bar screen. For all I know it may not be working properly, or missing something.

i think something like this might work:



You probably need some kind of software on your PC too, unless it acts like a flash drive or something.

Yep, it's one piece of an awesome pie. Congrats!!!

I was thinking I would probably need some sort of software as well, i'll try plugging it in with an adapter like the one you have pictured, but your probably right about the software thing. If anything at least I found an neat/interesting piece for my collection.

totally awesome. i hope something cool comes of this.

Hmm... do you happen to have a closer pic of the adapter? Don't think that cable is going to work, unless that adapter converts the port on the cart to a parallel port.

And there is always the possibility of writing a driver... it's definitely not going to be easy, but you can at least try to write a driver that can get a response from the cart at the minimum.

We need pics of the carts board. The bars on the screen are probably there because the battery in that thing is probably dead and the uploaded graphics are gone. I wouldn't hook that thing up to a PC trying to fiddle, if you also have to upload a ROM to it to run the program, you'll lose all program before you can even dump and possibly reverse engineer the code that runs it, although hopefully you just upload graphics to it. Although I doubt now that it's just the graphics you upload.

Take it apart and take some pics of the board, and hope it's just got bars not from it being run on batteries.

Neat, see something new everyday.

Here is A picture of the inside board. Meant to have it sooner but the camera was out of batteries. I can't actually pull the board out as it is attached to the rear connector which is riveted to the case. Still trying to figure out where this came from? The board doesn't appear to be made by Nintendo, but does look professionally made. Any Ideas guys?

Could be from a pirate place. Although with how close you are to Nintendo, I think it's a 3rd party design. Back in the 80's and this shows early to mid 90's, Software programmrs had the knowledge to add/make their own hardware, especially if they worked on arcade games. They probably needed a tool to see how the art would look outside of the emulator computer they used, and they just got this made somewhere.

I think the chip on the right is the program, I think those diagonal pins are data lines, I don't feel like looking for a SNES pinout right now. I think the middle chip's the parallel port connection that the program reads and checks what's happening. And then obviously the lockout....

I'm willing to bet it's a sound engineering/playback for the SNES. Looking at the lion king manual, Chip Level Designs is credited for the sound driver, and all over the net talks about using chip level music for those generations of consoles. I'm willing to bet that the parallel port is to burn SNES chiptunes onto the cart for playback in the console that used this specific sound driver.

http://www.world-of-nintendo.com/...

And before the comments of "it sez art not muzak lulz", music is a form of art.

Yes, so is programming too.

I would hardly call programming an art....

And didn't the OP say something about a color bar? It could just be the "play, pause, rewind" bar when music is loaded.

Well that's definitely more information than I started with, now at least I know Chip Level Designs did in fact exist. Thanks a bunch for the info, I couldn't find any information at all. I wonder how many games they worked on, looks like they are credited in earthworm jim as well.

Weird idea....did you plug in an SNES mouse when you tried it? Or pressed EVERY button on the controller when you plugged it in?