At 10:54 PM 8/15/00 -0400, Adin Petisca wrote:
>Have any of you expert collectors out there seen any prototype HuCards like
>this?
>
>http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemitem=410694778
>
>I'm trying to justify the $800.00 reserve price.
I own 5 of these prototypes of various games, including Magical Chase.
They consist of a PCB with 4 EPOM sockets and usually two EPROMs
(4 for the big games) The largest EPROM (for you hackers out there) that
I have seen in any proto card is a 27C010 (1M).
While I would no doubt the scarcity of these proto boards, I would be very
unwilling to spend $800 on one.
Theoretically, it would be reasonable to assume that at least one of these
existed for
every game issued. I know for a fact that the 5-in-1 NES cart is built
onto a proto
board with 2 1M EPROMs.
Interestingly enough, the proto cards seemed to be all made from standard FR-4
glass-epoxy material which is thicker than a standard Hucard. The
connector end
was filed down to taper to the thickness of a Hucard.
There are two variations of the proto card that I know of. One was an
official PCB
designed and provided by NEC, with the part number PWD-703. The other is a
sort of homebrew style card, loosely based on the NEC PCB layout. The ones
like this that I
have seen came from the former company now owned by Viacom NewMedia.
The NEC proto PCB has additional traces for jumpers to be added (hardwired)
to change the addressing
of the EPROMs.
A word of caution on the Ebay sale (as if I had to give one). There isn't
any picture of the unit for sale,
and I would certainly want to see it before bidding on it. None of my
protos have printed dates on
them, either. All of the dates seem to be penned in by hand.
For hacklist subscribers, the proto card, or a similar clone to it, would
make an excellent way of
testing out code, and possibly distributing new games.
As an aside, has anyone explored the possibility of making a
"Greenhouse-like" loadable Hucard
using serial SP^2 memories? They are getting quite small in size with
relation to their actual
storage capacity.
Keith Lee