Acquired a very little known Official Mega Drive ICE Debugger

Heya,


I recently acquired a Sega Mega Drive Debugger called the Advice Yokogawa AD200 ICE , and besides my Reddit posts , this post and this website (http://techdocs.exodusemulator.com/Console/SegaMegaDrive/Hardware.html ) there are 0 results on Google if you search exclusively for that term using the “Advice Yokogawa AD200” function, except some niche sites on Yahoo Japan using a VPN.


Basically this thing was an extremely strong ICE debugger that developers used , for anyone who wants a really good and “simple” explanation of what an ICE is , here you go ( If anyone needs additional help with the terms , “breakpoint” is basically a debugging tool where you would stop the execution of code when a certain event or criteria happened to inspect what is happening with the memory and code at that time and MMIO registers are basically specific registers dedicated to reading and writing information from and to an external device , a “probe” here is basically that cartridge looking thing on the box connected to those ribbon cables and the Motorola 68000 was the main CPU on the mega drive): https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogamedev/s/SppqTbowY8.


I’d be immensely grateful if anyone has any additional information or ideas how to get extra documentation or even just wants to have a discussion about it.


Besides the fact that I’m pretty sure this thing needs a modified developer’s mega drive to connect to a console , I think my best bet would be to post on Japanese boards like 2Chan for additional info , though Google Translate hasn’t really helped me with that .


Do you guys think opening it up and cleaning off the dust could be worth the risk of something breaking, and since it has a Sega sticker do you believe it intended was for first party use or it probably means it also could have been sold to a third party developer by Sega themselves ?

https://imgur.com/a/cvjTMi3

 

Thanks for the reply , I’m kind of new here , what wiki ?

 

Thanks , I’d be honoured to try and I believe I could make a pretty decently written formal page about it but the actual information would be very little , the articles I’ve read on there before are extremely thorough and extensive and usually only cover major topics .

I guess I could borrow information from the website I cited I above ( in the first paragraph ) or even make a page about devkits and ICE units but it would be basically me only scraping their entire page as a source , wouldn’t that bother them or be unethical ?

I could email them and ask them if I could basically copy their article

 

Shit really ? Awesome , @Nemesis if you’re okay with that I could do it for you , otherwise you can just keep up your stuff as a database , I’d love to discuss my ICE unit with you more , especially if those two units at the Google drive in the articles are yours

edit: Hahaha, after looking at that Google drive again , I realised by the broken front clip and date at the back that the first one is literally my unit Lmao