Hey, I'm not sure if this is newsworthy or interesting at all (if it isn't, go ahead and trash, I don't mind) This thing has popped up on ebay; See it here Even if nobody's going to pay the 400 USD to get it, maybe it's worth stealing the image for the wiki or something.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...#ht_1045wt_1138 It's now been relisted at $300 USD or best offer.
I believe this might be the CD-ROM "emulator board". The emulator board emulates a CD-ROM drive, which allows testing new software without having to burn a new CD-R (which was really expensive and slow at the time). The emulator board worked with the Cross Products dev unit, so the auction description might be incorrect. (Either that, or there was an earlier dev unit that wasn't Cross Products, or I'm completely wrong about what this board is. :P)
It's still expensive and slow. Burning a CD still can take up quite some time and also there's the fact you're wasting one disc each time you're testing. At least we have full hardware emulators these days though, so testing on real hardware isn't all that important these days. I believe there were several development boards.
If this was up on ebay about a year ago when I had the cash, I might have considered buying this. Now I feel like a complete moron for wasting it on six Prototype discs for the Sega Saturn and Sega CD. Four of which turned out to be near final games. The other two were two discs for an unreleased port of a PC/DOS FMV game on the Sega CD. Meh, oh well. lol. I just hope somebody buys this. Sounds like a hell of a lot of fun to mess with. I probably couldn't do much with it anyway. :v:
GerbilSoft is close, however, it is not the CD emulator but rather the debugging board. I have yet to see a CD emulator board appear anywhere. It's about as rare as a ZAX unit :p It's not really worth buying as even if you did have this AND the Cross Products unit, the software is pretty much lost to the passage of time as, in my extensive research, I've never seen it pop up. The 32X CartDev SDKs are the oldest official Mega Drive-era development packages I've seen pop up and that is only because the 32-X was still somewhat supported alongside the Saturn when the Sega DTS began mass distribution of dev tools instead of a developer registering, getting one set of floppies to their name, and no extra copies.
Listed ended and no one bought it. Oh well. Probably would have been more tempting if it could be used.
Oh, don't worry, if I had the money I'd have bought it in a heartbeat. I know how to use it too (well, the software is rarer than the Sega CD debug unit itself...)
