neo_ezekiel
I've been on this site for over 10 years.,
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2002
- Posts
- 276
SO awesome! brought me back LOL
http://i.imgur.com/IWu9LNo.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/jYwvoQH.jpg
I bought this board back in March last year. It was the first time I have come across a Dev board for sale that actually had the flash cards included. Looking at the auction I knew I could at least dump the 2 eproms that were on the board and I was immediately worried about the 2 Adtek SRAM cards. If this board was from the 90s, there was a high likelyhood that the batteries were dead (but more on that later). The Panasonic cards are Linear Flash and I was pretty confident that the data would be in tact if I could figure out how to dump them.
Earlier while I was waiting for the board to be delivered, I bought a few similar sized SRAM and different branded Flash cards to learn a bit about them. Bought various software and hardware that I hoped would dump it. Did some test dumps/reads from these cards and I was pretty confident I could dump them. I already had experience with SRAM cards, so I wasnt worried about that. I finally get around to dumping the Flash cards and varified that the dumps match the data on the cards.
it still was good having you in the room with us during the unveiling.
ive been checking in to make sure they would be the very last people to report on this. they were. the only news they seem interested in when it is breaking is wooden cmvs's, fake protos with nostalgia names attached, and tumblrina art projects.
But are you shaving yet?
Thank you for sharing the SNK Development PCBs pics and your description how you have dumped the data. It is awesome to finally see high resolution photos of the mysterious X3002 boards. I have only read about this board type in the SNK Programming Guide before(http://www.neohomebrew.com/forum-pics/2016/snk-x3002-development-pcb-board.png) and it is unbelievable that it is still complete (PROG+CHAR boards).
Totally incredible. Or, in-creh-dee-bull. The SKYCURSER team and I were showing our game off at the Midwest Gaming Classic and all of sudden I hear NTM is about to unveil some insane Neo proto. Needless to say, it sucked my attention away from my own shit ultra quick. Huge thanks to NeoTurfMasta for the hard work. Amazing.
Anyway, haven't posted in years. And, this was once a burner account. Came out for wild shit. Love you all.
- Phil
The board still works 100%. It's how I found out that the flash cards were labeled wrong. I also have an earlier similar dev board: http://i.imgur.com/NH8AYsw.jpg
This one only allows PCMCIA cards for the program data. The rest of the data is stored on many eproms. What I like about this particular board is it has the linking capability.
As far as divulging how I dumped the data, I'm keeping that a secret at the moment. I can write data to similar cards and run different Neo games.
Thanks a lot for the additional photos (finding the ADTEK IC card reader is awesome too ).
Yes, of course I have seen your other dev board already, it seems to be the X0007-EPIC0, right? It is interesting that it uses a different memory card type.
I am glad to read that the X3002 boards are still working after all this time (and could maybe re-produced one day?).
Would you say that using IC cards was a "real" advancement for SNK compared to the use of EPROMs in regards to writing speed and handling?
Pardon my ignorance. Is all the game's info contained on the PCMCIA cards and the PCB like a blank RAM container that anything can be put in? Or, does the PCB contain chips with data that is necessary to support this particular game? For example, if you had different game data on the PCMCIA cards could you plug them in the PCB slots and have a different game boot?
The board will play whatever you want, depending on the rom size. If I were to remove the 2 prog rom eproms, and put in a compatible PCMCIA with the prog data on it, it would boot the game. There is nothing on this board that prevents it from playing other games. The limiting factor is rom size, which I havent calculated the max for this board. It will probably play just about any non encrypted neo title.
Interesting. Makes sense.. Thank you for answering my question. So, there may be more lost Neo-Geo prototypes out there on PCMCIA cards? These days, do think companies like NG DEV are making their games and testing on a board like this or more modern, better tools that shadow this process?
NTM, NGF put on their site for many years photos of one of these boards with the cards inserted. I think they were claiming it was the "Neo Pool Master" proto. Have you looked at those photos and compared the board and the PCMCIA cards to what you got?
Yeah I remember seeing them before. A few of them use the same Panasonic card mine has. http://www.neogeofreak.com/protos/bangbusters_.jpg
No telling what is really on them. But in that pic they use the Panasonic cards for the P & V roms, I could have sworn that the manual said that you had to use a different type of memory card at least for the P roms. It's something I will probably test out at some point.
EDIT:
Yeah the guide says the Program rom is only compatible with JEIDA V3 memory cards. These Panasonic cards are V4. I don't know if the dev board in their pic is compatible with V4 cards, but it's a little suspicious to have that card in the Prog slot. But since I cant find any documentation on their particular board, I cant be 100% sure. If SNK's manual says only to use V3 cards for Prog data... I would go with that.
Great info... I guess the good news of being teased with the emulated screenshots of all Xacrow's stuff is they're off the proto boards and at least archived somewhere. Not sure if it really matters if it stays locked away for all time, but at least there is hope of one day recovering those games.