Dreamcast unknown SEGA PCI card 171-7595A

[T_chan]

To avoid hijacking jackhead's thread about the SET4,
and to summarize all the info gathered about this card posted on assemblergames in march 2009 before it disappears:

Facts:
- unknown Sega PCI board with SCSI connector & VGA output
- references: Sega 1997, 837-13338, 171-7595A.
- the VGA connector is connected to a Conexant chip (Bt121KPJ80), which is a is a Video DAC - 24bit color @80MHz.
- the two fpga's count some 10.000 & 16.000 gates,
- there's 2 x MByte Edo RAM, connected to 6x256kbyte fieldbuffers
- Fuji chip near the ram is Fuji MD0206 - 079803
- the SCSI connector is in fact of the female type, exactly like the "Connector I/O" one on a Set5 devkit, or the "cont.box" connector on a Set4....
- I connected the card to an old Win98jp pc - as expected, nothing appeared on the monitor. The card was recognised as a PCI Multimedia device, but without driver, it remains uninstalled...
- I inserted it in a WinXP pro pc, the system didn't even see there was a card...
- the prog "Advanced PCI Info" gives on Win98jp: vendor = Altera, besides that not much extra info
- Looking at the reference & the year, it was the period of the DC dev kits & arcade stuff:
eg. 1997 SET5 GDROM INTERCONNECTOR BOARD (171-7590D)
eg. 837-13342: Security Board for Zero Gunner all versions
- 171-7598B = Set 4 motherboard.

The suppositions:
- T_chan: (big dreamer )
171-7595 = Set 1 ?
171-7596 = Set 2 ?
171-7597 = Set 3 ?
171-7598 = Set 4 = fact
- Twimfy (assemblergames): an interface card of some sort for the Katana Dev kit
- Evangelion (assemblergames): NAOMI Dev Card ? Or something linked to Naomi hardware
- Assembler (assemblergames): Those are arcade connections, it's probably for arcade dev.
Naomi dev in 1997? Unlikely. Saturn only came out in 1995. Most likely it's some sort of STV dev card or similar. Possibly it's a sophia systems card.
Being purely asic perhaps it's related to arcades, or pico.
- port187 (assemblergames): best guess here is a katana dev kit pci card to connect some external GD-ROM writer or whatever.
- raylyd (assemblergames): an Early Development Kit for dreamcast - i am not too sure
- saturn_worship (assemblergames): could be something related to saturn2/saturn-add on or pre-katana??
- VitAmen (assemblergames): we have seen katana set4 motherboards from 1997, so it is quite possible this piece of hardware is dreamcast/naomi related.
- iamaduck (assemblergames): It almost looks like a video capture card with SCSI interface.
- alecjahn (assemblergames): I'm feeling the Katana-vibe, but it seems odd that something of that era would be unknown to people around here. The few Katana boards I've seen were also marked 1997.
- Jackhead (here on obscuregamers): Karaoke ?

One thing I'm more interested in is a possible connection between the Set 4 hardware, and this card:
View attachment 318View attachment 319View attachment 320View attachment 321
I have this card sitting in my garage, but what it does is a bit of a mystery. I don't have any drivers for it, and I haven't been able to link it back to anything Sega has released before. This card is from 1997. I thought that was too early to be related to Dreamcast development, but I can see from your pictures that not only was the Set 4 built in 1997, this card is almost certainly related to it. Sega stamp every single PCB they produce, both small and large, across all their hardware from dev and prototype units to final console and arcade systems, with an ID number of the form "171-XXXX", possibly with a revision letter at the end (IE, A, B, C, etc). The numbers are sequentially allocated, so boards that are designed together will usually have adjacent IDs. Sega designed a lot of PCBs across all their divisions, so those numbers increase constantly and quite quickly. This card has an ID of 171-7595A, while the pictures show that the Set 4 main board has an ID of 171-7598B. I doubt that's a coincidence. Any ideas how this mystery card might link in?

 

[T_chan]

And to reply to:

the PCI card should be for SKC-1000 or some think use
check it out SKC-1000 back connector ..
View attachment 353

This doesn't prove anything... in either way, positive or negative.
As I wrote in 2009, it's also the same connector as the one on the back of the SET4, for the controller box.

 

[mltv]

I have a PCI card in my stash, that was for naomi development (IIRC). It'll take me a bit to dig up, but I will try to tonight and see if you have the same card.