Dreamcast What are these?

[scurl]

got a bunch of stuff that was used by black box games which included multiple dreamcasts and various dc parts, and these japanese dcs have strange boards on them. the perfboard one is a prototype, i think, and the pcb is final version with "black box games" printed on the board.













i THINK they're for debugging, but i'm not into dev stuff so don't know. I just know they're very similar to the debugging boards that are on the psx systems i got in the same bunch of stuff.

Was hoping someone here might be able to shed some light on these because, time for refreshing honesty, i want to sell them and need to know what they are lol
i haven't powered anything on as the post it notes on the prototype that say "fucked?" and "catches fire?!" are pretty clear about not....doing that.

some pics of another one with a busted perfboard

 

[PrOfUnD Darkness]

This is crazy so many wires. While I can't help to id them, it's cool to see hardware that probably didn't come from SEGA, thanks for sharing. Btw the only game they developed for the Dreamcast was NHL2K (according to wikipedia).

 

[Wombat]

At first glance these Dreamcast systems look like regular but clearly modified VA0 models. I'm really curious to know what the functionality is of those breakout boards.

I can see a wire tapping into the bios, so perhaps on of its features was to swiftly swap to different regions for them to test functionality.
To really figure out what's going on; check the Dreamcast schematics that are out there to identify to which part/functionality these wires are connected.

 

[Trimesh]

Yeah, probably the probe board for a debugger - the EPROM is presumably a resident monitor and the 128kB RAM chip is working storage (so you don't have to use any system memory) - the two IDT chips are FIFOs - presumably one for commands and the other for responses.

Presumably the 25-way D connector is the host connection - since they bothered to use FIFOs, it's probably fairly high speed (I.E. not just a PC parallel port) - the patch wires on the top of the main DC board appear to interrupt the CS/ signal on the boot ROM, probably so the external board can select between the original SEGA boot ROM and the EEPROM.

Kind of interesting, but IMO not very useful without the host interface and the software to drive it.