Weird SNES machine in auction?

[snesfreak]

Labeled as a SNES Mystery Machine. What is this crazy thing? Looks interesting.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3068249485

[Flack]

It looks like some Willy Wonka invention with all those colored buttons and knobs. Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if inside that thing was hollow and all that shit was just stuck on there. I can't imagine playing games on that little screen, maybe it was used to test carts to see if they were good? Even then it seems like you could just plug it into a real SNES which would be a lot smaller and test it just as easily. That's very interesting!

[badinsults]

I asked one of the makers of zsnes, and he said it was a cart programmer.

[badinsults]

What I would be most interested in would be all the rom images that are on it... image how many betas and unreleased games could be on it if there are 817 games.

[MarioAllStar2600]

I can't believe how low that went. I would've jumped on that bad boy in a second.

[KirbyStar27]

that things a beast
:D

[Jasoco]

:eek 2: Damn damn damn damn damn..

That would have gone GREAT with my SNES Control Deck Tester. O_O O_O :(

[ragtime_tgs]

im almost 100% sure this is a checksum tester for snes games aka a unit that
can tell you if an inserted game works/has valid data on it or not.
every game has an information sector containing game name, country, memory map, sram, special chips etc and the checksum.
add all bytes of the rom and divide through the total number of bytes the rom has and there you are.
i saw a similar one on a photo of NOEs (nintendo of europe) repair center.
i dont believe its a cart programmer.
only the very latest snes protocarts had flashrom on it(around 1997) and i never saw one of these outside japan, the normal snes eprom protos dont
have an option to program the eproms plugged into them,you'd have to do that manually with an eprom programmer.

[Mac-Abre]

Yeah, I'm in agreement with ragtime. I have a PC memory chip tester that looks extremely similar to this device. The chip tester just verifies if the chip is good or not by running tests on it.

[Jasoco]

Still. I would have bought this in a heartbeat!

[bensenvill]

wow, I did a triple take on that auction. That is frickn cool. And unfortunately I am not that lucky buyer.

I'm going with checksum tester, if it was a chip programmer, I would expect a serial or parrallel data cable. It would need more than just a cart slot. reguardless, I want it.

~Tj