Blank SNES development board - What did I just buy?

[cheesystick]

Hello,

This is not a proto, but I just couldn't see listing this under Classic Gaming. This appears to be a blank development board for the SNES. I recently purchased this here and it just came in the mail:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...K%3AMEWNX%3AIT

The cart reads copyright 1993 Nintendo SHVC-8PV5B-01 down the right side. Above the watch battery, (a basic CR2032 which says 94-03), is what appears to be a set of dip switches. It reads "Mitsumi" on the housing of the set. Below the battery are four chip sets. Directly below the battery is a flat, small chip. After that is a short but large protruding chip, the most impressive on the board. Below that are two longer, flat chips. The rest of the board consists of a series of "chip access points" and they are all blank. My roommate says this where the "IC" chips go, and its reads eprom below each unused slot, which makes perfect sense. I’m guessing that these four chips are used for running basic programming and the others are all blank because this is an unused development board. I'm obviously not very technical so please excuse my lack of knowledge when it comes to talking about such things.

This was a BIN so I just jumped on it as a collector's piece. I had never seen anything like this before; then again, I had never looked. What can you tell me about this thing? Did I get a good deal? What is one of these things worth?


Even if it is a blank board, I think it is a cool collector’s piece and I’m glad I got it. Seeing the Nintendo logo running down the side made the purchase worth it to me. It is like owning a piece of history in the birthing process of a SNES game, even if it didn’t end up getting used.

I haven't had the balls to pop this thing in to my SNES, but I highly doubt it would do anything. The seller has a whole bunch of similar boards for the Sega Genesis and 32X if you all are interested.

I'm not about to develop anything for this thing, but if I were to, do you know if the IC chips would be proprietary to put into this thing? Or could you get some after-market chips to stick into it?

Also, I am thinking about getting a couple of the Sega boards as trade bait, but maybe not. Are they worth it? If you look at the pictures of the Genesis and 32X boards, they were made by the “Advantech Corporation,” which is just a Taiwanese company that produces chip boards and computer hardware apparently, so they don’t seem to be officially “SEGA” branded. I know that such companies make a lot of those blank boards for cheap at a low cost, so maybe they aren’t worth it. Buy hey - they might be worth it to somebody or one of you guys. Even with these blank boards, it is like you are holding a piece of history with how games were supposed to be developed and made.

Any info on the boards would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris

[portnoyd]

It's exactly what you think it is. I have an unused NES board myself. Neat museum-type piece - nice to put on display and that's it. Imo, the price you paid was fair.

[badinsults]

I think these dev boards just use normal EPROMs. You should be able to put any SNES game on it, except those with special coprocessors or those that require more than 256k of RAM.