Hey Steve I know that some people know that there is a receptacle mint journaling for the airline cleaning crews to use for their vacuum cleaners not intended for passenger yes but sometimes they don't give people problems about this. Note controlled separately from USB and other power for passenger use. Although Airline was aware that I didn't need to have power a bit more than usual for charging and therapy needs and was briefed that whenever I'm on an aircraft I would have this available for my own use and sometimes it's used for certain things if authorized were needed it helps when you use the same airline for years and I know your needs And we're very aware we would not be using an exit row and yeah we had someone once that tried to open an emergency exit I don't know if it was claustrophobic or what but they were freaking out it was still pulling out at the gate but yeah things that are said and or enforced for reasons there's a reason why they say not to tamper with such as the smoke detector in lavatory apparently once there was actually a malfunction when was on a plane no smoke but it indicates smoke and was verified it was malfunction and did not affect the flight what is the few times where the safety item like this could cause a problem and it be the problem itself
Team 17 isn't just "some company", they're the studio behind the Worms series altogether, along with other stuff like Alien Breed, Project-X, Superfrog etc. They're still around today, though they've pivoted to indie publishing in recent years. It seems like Acclaim had US publishing rights for Worms 3D (in contrast to Sega publishing it in Europe). Worms is pretty simple when you wrap your head around it. Players take it in turns to control each worm in their team, in rotation, to move and attack.
@@roflBecktrue. Shock sensitive as in for example dropping it from 6 ft Wright do some damage or maybe even last. I've heard about people knocking over an external hard drive and completely trashing the drive rendering the data unreadable and the Drive unusable judging by the clicking it was toast this was the aftermath when I checked I was told it was just knocked over when it was sitting on the desk to the desk surface one of the vertical ones you think that it would be designed better than that causing Total Carnage
Tito, I think you have to give the old 2d worms games a chance. The series didn’t make the best transition to 3d but the old 2d games are legendary fun. I wasn’t a fan of turn based games until I played worms 2
Worms Armageddon was my jam. First played the original on SNES, then played Armageddon on PSX, which was really good, and finally I absolutely fell in love with the PC version. Great games.
The 3D Worms games are underrated imo. They're different, and certainly lose some of the immediacy and accessibility of the 2D games, but if you had played so much 2D Worms that you needed a change, they were great fun.
Worms 4 Mayhem fixed alot of the issues with Worms 3D, most notably the way too big levels and hard to aim weapons. Sadly after that Worms fell into obscurity. I never understood why though, Worms 4 Mayhems was advertized alot and pretty popular from what I remember.
Great video! I have a Nintendo N-DEV unit for the Wii I bought from a game dev studio in Spain. Would you be interested in making a similar video on it?
@@claytonnoble568 Well I don't want it just preserved and distributed, but also to use these dev kits to help people make homebrew or brand new games for older consoles
So the Gang Writer used to belong to Acclaim Studios Cheltenham in the UK. I used to work in Cheltenham back in the early 2000's and drove past the studio every day. I even had couple of friends work there as QA testers. I remember finding out about Extreme-G 3 about a month before it was announced due to them.
the sticker on the side of the unit at 4:31 is a pat test sticker.Portable appliance testing (PAT) is the term used to describe the examination of electrical appliances and equipment to ensure they are safe to use
Sorry, man, but I must download this video before it disappear from TH-cam. It’s historical. It’s an remarkable Piece of VG history, and It’s beautiful for everything it represents, excellent work.
You might be able to put it up on the internet archive, but i'm not sure if they allow vids, & if they do, if they have a size/bandwidth limit so it might need to be re-coded into a smaller size or older format.
have you dumped the contents of that harddrive to the internet archive? It's probably interesting to see what differences there're between that development build and the retail version of worms 3d
This is exactly correct. We used similar Tools to test how games would respond to full memory cards. Such as ensuring the proper messages would show, or even odd behaviors/crashes that could occur if the memory card was full and unable to write data too.
BigN had developers run a number of tools to validate certain conditions, and specific messages needed to be shown for each (card not present, corrupted, full, read errors, etc). That specific tool was used to introduce those errors. If I recall they were referred to as TCR. We ran those a lot in the latter days of dev of games to ensure we wouldn’t get a build rejected right off the bat (as dev/publishers paid for each submission).
@@YuviApp The last scenario is exactly what I would imagine the situation with the "destroy memory card" prompt, to test out how the game would behave with a broken/corrupted memory card. What I assume it does, is forcefully corrupting a bunch (or very specific) files on it. If I'm wrong of course please correct it, it's really cool to learn these kinds of stuff.
It's Nintendont hardware!! It's worth $2 because it's very slow and basic hardware compared to all other companies. Nintendo consoles have the game's but every other console has the best hardware.
FYI there’s also separate PAL NPDP reader, so you didn’t really try all regions. It was probably not a region issue, the slots on those carts were often full of junk data and busted builds.
FYI, the GDEV has 48MB of main RAM while the NPDP reader has the normal 24MB, so not everything on a NPDP cart will work on the NPDP reader. My understanding is the NPDP reader was intended more as an early QA tool where you can rapidly make changes rather than a way to play dev builds like the gdev
I was a tester back then. We used the NPDP carts/reader all the way through development, up to and including the excruciating Lot Check process. We only used the NR disks/reader during the mastering process, iirc we barely burnt a half dozen of them. The disks were expensive and unnecessary.
Yeah, absolutely wild that all these years we've wondered what's inside NPDP carts, and it turns out it's a 6GB hard drive and a freakin' SH-3 🤯🤯 My jaw dropped
@@Kniffel101 it's weird, as soon as I saw it I thought "oh, that's from the Saturn" ...the Saturn had dual SH-2s and an SH-1 for the CD-ROM. the 32X had one SH-2. it really was the only one sega didn't use...
As for the SCSI in/out ports, I believe this was common in SCSI devices. I used to have a SCSI scanner, and it also had in/out ports. You could daisy chain devices as you said, but it wouldn't be limited to the Gangwriter (unless the card you showed also had some sort of limitation). Thanks for the insight, really cool video.
I have to wonder if it's actually just SCSI though. I can't think of any SCSI devices that need special hardware on the host side. Drivers, sure, but a bespoke SCSI host device that needed so much horsepower that it required its own CPU *and* FPGA? that's wild. I wonder what would have made that necessary, since it appears it was just a fancy disk array.
@@swolfington Yep, my guess is they're only using the physical interface due to it's bandwidth and signal integrity (hence keeping much of the physical protocol intact), but using a proprietary data set underneath, which the interface card handles.
@@swolfington My scanner did come with a PCI SCSI card because it wasn't a port that was available on most motherboards. This one does sound a bit over engineered for "just" SCSI.
@@gvfc Sorry, i just meant special hardware beyond a typical SCSI host card. The strange thing is the one in the video doesn't even appear have a typical SCSI controller chip, though I guess the CPU or FPGA could probably have done the job (though that would be an expensive way to do it just for an SCSI controller). Even high end RAID SCSI cards didn't have that much horsepower afaik. They must have been doing something pretty special to need that kind of heavy lifting. edit: i just realized i was misremembering, the CPU was on the NPD cartridge itself, not the pci card. still though, pretty exotic stuff. would be cool to know more about what they were actually doing.
Even though the cable looks like a scsi cable, it’s not actualy using the scsi protocol. That being said, yes, you could daisy chain a couple gw to write more carts at the same time.
The PCI card in summary has the large FPGA doing the SCSI-to PCI BUS transcoding. The LVC chips are logic level shifting, likely for 5V to 3.3V. The EEPROM holds the configuration for the larger fpga and the smaller CPLD is likely "helping" the larger FPGA. Perhaps lack of pins they needed extra control logic. You basically nailed it already; its a SCSI to PCI card.
Looking at the traces between the altera cpld and the eeprom, i expect the cpld is responsible for copying the fpga configuration "bitstream" from the rom into the fpga at power-on. Virtex / virtex2 series did not have very powerful self-loading abilities, so using a small micro or cpld to get them alive was common practice. Especially to program a large 1700 chip in time to talk PCI. Funny that a Xilinx FPGA is used with an Altera CPLD, and not a Xilinx CoolRunner.. (the two companies hate each other) I expect the "scsi" cable is not talking scsi at all. More likely it just offers many parallel high-speed wires, with a proprietary protocol on top.
@@SittingDuc Good insight! I'm used to modern FPGAs that will boot from QSPI, eMMC, SD card, JTAG, and more. Configuring in time for PCI enumeration is definitely a concern.
SCSI devices could be daisy chained and had to be terminated on the last device on the chain. SCSI was faster than IDE at the time, making it the superior interface for External drives, CD burners, etc. Some SCSI devices had auto termination as well.
The NR discs were used when the games were ready as the media was expensive. at the early stages of the game the cartridge was used. If I remember correctly the spindle of 25 discs was $250.
Nice to see that you made a review from my old development kit (npdp-gw). The picture that you showed is also from my Reddit. Btw, probably bank 3 didn’t read because it’s possible a pal game. I saw it before on one of my npdp cartridges that they put a ntsc and a pal game together on it. If you’re interested for reviewing, I have a pal npdp reader still for sale.
The "missing link" would be the Silicon Graphics computer which was back in the day a very powerful machine used for graphics and video special effects and very very expensive piece of hardware. This would have created the form, the structure of the game, likely rendering the various polygons and visual effects, some companies had "locked" machines like Sega had for a while where it had built in the full array of development tools and extremely costly and remained more a loan than owning the machines. I remember seeing one at Codemaster's back when I was on the alpha team for Lotro and this chap said to me "don't touch it, don't breathe on it, don't even look at it cos if it breaks down again it will be on your shoulders it will fall", there were different types that were more graphic than computational and some who were more computational than graphical, most had MS Visual suites on as using a Visual compiler to knock up your code was the done thing with the old machine code programmers considered cavemen. BTW Cheltenham is pronounced "Chel-tenham" with the ten and ham rolled into one sound more a ummm than a pronounced "ham", think RTC has a museum to old gaming stuff around there.
Hey I remember having a chance to play with a silicon Graphics workstation back in the day during a stay at a summer program at Michigan Tech when I was quite Young my mind was just blown by what it could do compared to the average at that time. Nowadays stuff at that time that was high as possible it seems like a Raspberry Pi could help me literally but it just seems like this like where phones put older laptops to shame that sort of thing not to mention costs have come down for some technology to be just everyday stuff that's way more advanced than what used to be thousands of thousands of dollars for something that was nowhere near Campbell as current Hardware is for a lot less cost
To be fair WATA Grading is in bed with Heritage Auctions, HA being known for market fixing and manipulation. WATA is also known to do the same. I would open any WATA case just out of spite, garbage company.
Note: at 6:36 Macho Nacho says a serial number that is slightly different from the one on the left. The one he said, starting with EPM, is the correct one, not the one on the 'part number' line. Otherwise great video, keep it up!
I am assuming the game card qa tool was to test how the game saves to blocks to validate it doesn't corrupt other save data. QA probably used it to quickly fill up the card to make sure a save didn't overwrite other save data or cause other corruptions, testing many different scenarios, sizes, and brands (such as Nintendo official vs madcatz or something). Last thing you would want is to have saves corrupt its own or other games save data.
Funny thing is Team17 is still around and making worms games for modern consoles. My SO was playing the new worms game on the ps4, and I had to look into them at the time and the game because my firewall was breaking their crappy networking code somehow related to their in-game ads.
@@TrollDeckerYep. Not the best publisher, IMHO, but yep. I have gripes with their ports... PC games ported on consoles seem to be of uneven quality. One game in particular got "forked" from a WAAAY to old version and the console customers are "stuck" with a lesser version.
I've never played Worms 3D, but I have loved some other games in the franchise. Especially the one on Xbox Live Arcade, had a blast playing that one with my neighbor.
10:18 inb4 PH pride comes in. Though to be fair, Toshiba HDDs are still being made here. I wonder if the partition inside that is readable in a PC and if you could swap that with a SSD? There are IDE SSDs, though uncommon, and even then, there's converters. But that's laregly untested.
Please dump the whole contents of the carts. If you don't feel comfortable with releasing it yourself, I am very sure you can find some in the preservation community to do it.
The memory card tool was used to fill up memory cards with junk so you could test edge case scenarios where there wasn't enough storage left on the card. Your game had to handle this gracefully and not clobber other data on the card.
As someone that lives in Cheltenham, it pains me to hear you mispronounce my lovely town’s name (drop the “H”, it sounds weird). It’s pronounced CHELT-EN-UM. PS on a side note, I had no idea that Acclaim had a studio here.
The label is called a PAT and stands for Portable Applience Test, and needs to be performed every 12 months if used in a public or work space in the UK.
If you think a region problem was stopping bank 1 from working, I'd assume it's a PAL region build, especially considering the fact that bank 0 has Worms 3D on it (Team 17, which develops the Worms series, is a British company). So the USA and Japan switch won't change that, since USA and Japan modes are both NTSC. Of course, it could also be that something just wasn't formatted correctly, or it was corrupted.
Difference between a NR disc(debug) and NROM disc(retail) is that the NR Disc has no BCA and uses a fixed key using discID(gameID+makerID) and fixed key number is 9
I was a little surprised to see the hard drive inside of the cartridge, but then I remembered that the multi gigabyte capacity required to store four GCN disk images wouldn’t be economical with flash storage for at least another 15 years. Besides, speed isn’t an issue, as you’re going to want to emulate optical drive latency and throughput. The only reason I was really expecting flash memory in the cartridge is because I’m only used to seeing memory chips in one. (Usually ROM chips, though.)
I appreciate the documentation but the clickbait title is just gonna promote fearmongering, which is really annoying to deal with when I have to explain to people "No, Nintendo doesn't care that you downloaded roms" or whathaveyou. I get it, gotta have the hustle and all that, just saying please keep in mind that these kinds of clickbait titles have lasting consequences, if not for how it's annoying for those of us who have to explain to people that there's nothing to be afraid of, then consider that it can scare people into not preserving or revealing stuff that they might have.
Has all supplemental stuff that *could* be archived, been archived with these? That xilinx chip has to hold it's vhdl/verilog info somewhere, if you could dump that that would be incredible
Given what on the "carts" I don't think it would be wise to risk it. Rom dumps are technically illegally already in many countries, but this is prerelease code that likely falls under a more protective legal standard.
@@silasmayes7954 Companies care less about prototypes than the actual games themselves. And no, there's countless people who shared prototypes online, and, unless it's by Nintendo, no company gives a damn about them.
EDIT: Probably not lol Could someone take the way that FPGA is laid out and port it out to hardware the rest of us could use? FPGA Gamecube :O. MiSTer Cubed :O. Or maybe Its-A-Me-STer
I'd imagine the fourth bank is for testing reusable code for save data management to be implemented in games. It'd make more sense to me do this rather than create bespoke backend file management tools on a per game basis, just create one and add a custom frontend to suit the game. Also it'd be worth dumping the P-ROM on the cartridge and uploading the data somewhere imo, you never know it might help someone in the future
A collaboration with Hard4Games or a similar group to better explore the content on those carts if they haven't already been examined outside of this video would be pretty cool.
Worms 3D was so fun to play with friends but the version I played back in the day was the PC one There's another older game of the saga that's 2D, that was also good and highly recommended too
I wonder if you could retrieve old builds of worms or other games from that hard drive trough fancy analysis techniques of deleted blocks of data (not sure what the proper term is)
Awesome video love the world of devkits, speaking of PCI. I would love to see you get into the world of retro computing, building or restoring a Retro PC for Windows 98, XP or DOS and games are super cheap to collect for. Would love to see your take on Retro PC gaming or even Micro Computers like the Amiga, Commodore 64 or the MSX2. It would be a nice change of pace compared to the usual consoles and handhelds. When it comes to retro pc's. I recommend going Pentium 3 era and before. Beyond that kind of goes into the modern era of PC gaming. LGR, MVG, Digital Foundry, 8BitGuy, Nostalgia Nerd, RMC, Phils Computer Lab, Linus, MJR are great channels that either covered that stuff, or based their channel around it. But there is a problem with older PC's are the caps, they are going bad and the parts are getting rarer and more expensive.
The SCSI form factor was an addressable "Daisy Chain" format. So even things like a bed scanner would normally have an out. And, since computers back then probably couldn't handle 2 SCSI cards (the drivers would confuse each other) the out on the writer may have been used for something like a scanner. Just trying to pull info from my old brain.... Without a deep dive... The PCI card honestly just seems like a generic SCSI card. I'm guessing the software is the real key to it. Great VID !!!!!
Just as a heads up, if a British place is named "X-enham", it's probably pronounced "X-enum" (not too much emphasis on the um - it's not like going "um" out loud) i.e. Cheltenham is pronounced cheltenum, Tottenham is pronounced tottenum, etc.
You are performing such an amazing service by documenting and sharing this info. It's well out of my wheel house but amazingly cool and I'm sure will help individuals far more skilled at developing for us fans to enjoy.
9:46 That's a Hitachi SuperH-3 specifically. I don't know much about the SH-3 in particular, but the SuperH RISC architecture was used in a handful of game consoles, arcade machines, and used a lot by SEGA. SEGA helped design the SH-2, two SH-2 CPUs are the main source of processing power in the SEGA 32X and SEGA Saturn! The Dreamcast is powered by a SH-4! The SH-3 seems to be the only SuperH chip not used by SEGA for anything!
Not a developer, however I am familiar with the hardware. When I worked at Nintendo Of America in Redmond, WA. I remember they had a little museum of Nintendo history in the testing and development building. Additionally they had a shelf of unreleased and unused hardware that had been developed and canceled in the tech support buildings QC department.
![[UNCUT] “บอสณวัฒน์” ลากไส้!! ใครหนุนหลัง "แม่ตั๊ก ป๋าเบียร์" I คนดังนั่งเคลียร์ I 30 ก.ย. 67](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QlD7mU2KKRk/mqdefault.jpg)
Air Hostess - Please only open emergency exit in an emergency.
Tito - Since it wasn’t an emergency, I opened it.
😂
Lemon Demon’s “I’ve Got Some Falling To Do” is very relevant here.
Tell me why i read that in Perd Haply's voice
Hey Steve I know that some people know that there is a receptacle mint journaling for the airline cleaning crews to use for their vacuum cleaners not intended for passenger yes but sometimes they don't give people problems about this.
Note controlled separately from USB and other power for passenger use.
Although Airline was aware that I didn't need to have power a bit more than usual for charging and therapy needs and was briefed that whenever I'm on an aircraft I would have this available for my own use and sometimes it's used for certain things if authorized were needed it helps when you use the same airline for years and I know your needs
And we're very aware we would not be using an exit row and yeah we had someone once that tried to open an emergency exit I don't know if it was claustrophobic or what but they were freaking out it was still pulling out at the gate but yeah things that are said and or enforced for reasons there's a reason why they say not to tamper with such as the smoke detector in lavatory apparently once there was actually a malfunction when was on a plane no smoke but it indicates smoke and was verified it was malfunction and did not affect the flight what is the few times where the safety item like this could cause a problem and it be the problem itself
You know how people are also when they say not to do something someone is going to do it eventually
Video downloaded just in-case Nintendo take this down, just like Sony did with your PS5 devkit video.
Thank you.
They might see this comment and email you to delete that video lol
@@TheM0nkeyBombE-Mail? More like a letterbomb or maybe even Boeing.
Hahaha downloaded as well even so far as to use a downloader from URL so have a copy 😊
Can I get a copy of that video?
Team 17 isn't just "some company", they're the studio behind the Worms series altogether, along with other stuff like Alien Breed, Project-X, Superfrog etc. They're still around today, though they've pivoted to indie publishing in recent years. It seems like Acclaim had US publishing rights for Worms 3D (in contrast to Sega publishing it in Europe).
Worms is pretty simple when you wrap your head around it. Players take it in turns to control each worm in their team, in rotation, to move and attack.
Before Worms we’d never heard of the Concrete Donkey
@@actuallyusingmyrealnameher5061 History has the Trojan Horse, Worms has the Concrete Donkey.
Worms wins.
"Isn't just some company" then names ONE game anyone on planet earth has ever heard of 😂😂
@@poultrylord7300 yep, because the worms series only has the one game. 🤦
@@poultrylord7300idiots stacking onto idiots
9:04 “On the back is a warning label telling us it's very dangerous to disassemble this device. So, let's disassemble it!"
Just to clarify “shock sensitive” doesn’t mean it’s dangerous. Just didn’t want idiots opening and getting any data wiped.
It's just dangerous to the device itself, not the person. But still funny.
@@roflBecktrue.
Shock sensitive as in for example dropping it from 6 ft Wright do some damage or maybe even last.
I've heard about people knocking over an external hard drive and completely trashing the drive rendering the data unreadable and the Drive unusable judging by the clicking it was toast this was the aftermath when I checked I was told it was just knocked over when it was sitting on the desk to the desk surface one of the vertical ones you think that it would be designed better than that causing Total Carnage
You get a 1000 Volt electric shock if you open it.
You can tell how much Tito enjoyed clasping that T-handle.
We need more of those in or everyday life
Tito, I think you have to give the old 2d worms games a chance. The series didn’t make the best transition to 3d but the old 2d games are legendary fun. I wasn’t a fan of turn based games until I played worms 2
Worms Armageddon was my jam. First played the original on SNES, then played Armageddon on PSX, which was really good, and finally I absolutely fell in love with the PC version.
Great games.
I played so much on mobile back in middle school, then on PC during the pandemic era
The 3D Worms games are underrated imo. They're different, and certainly lose some of the immediacy and accessibility of the 2D games, but if you had played so much 2D Worms that you needed a change, they were great fun.
Worms 4 Mayhem fixed alot of the issues with Worms 3D, most notably the way too big levels and hard to aim weapons. Sadly after that Worms fell into obscurity. I never understood why though, Worms 4 Mayhems was advertized alot and pretty popular from what I remember.
Great video! I have a Nintendo N-DEV unit for the Wii I bought from a game dev studio in Spain. Would you be interested in making a similar video on it?
Commented and upvote for exposure!
Yes please do a collaboration
This! We need these copied and uploaded as well for data preservation and distribution.
@@claytonnoble568 Well I don't want it just preserved and distributed, but also to use these dev kits to help people make homebrew or brand new games for older consoles
PLEASE DO THAT THAT WOULD BE SO COOL
Nintendo: don’t open it
Tito: I’m going to open it
Nintendo: 🤦♂️
Nintendo: Okay, fine. Just blur it like its indecent exposure.
Tito: Say no more, famicom.
😂
So the Gang Writer used to belong to Acclaim Studios Cheltenham in the UK. I used to work in Cheltenham back in the early 2000's and drove past the studio every day. I even had couple of friends work there as QA testers. I remember finding out about Extreme-G 3 about a month before it was announced due to them.
the sticker on the side of the unit at 4:31 is a pat test sticker.Portable appliance testing (PAT) is the term used to describe the examination of electrical appliances and equipment to ensure they are safe to use
Sweet, that’s good to know. Thanks Lee!!
Sorry, man, but I must download this video before it disappear from TH-cam. It’s historical. It’s an remarkable Piece of VG history, and It’s beautiful for everything it represents, excellent work.
I have made a copy too.
For the history
You might be able to put it up on the internet archive, but i'm not sure if they allow vids, & if they do, if they have a size/bandwidth limit so it might need to be re-coded into a smaller size or older format.
Not that serious 😂😂😂
@@DaOptimus1 You are correct, but those that don't bother to learn what their options are don't have any options at all.
Same here man. I didn't realize the PS5 dev kit video was taken down, but thankfully someone downloaded it before it got taken down.
have you dumped the contents of that harddrive to the internet archive? It's probably interesting to see what differences there're between that development build and the retail version of worms 3d
The create file tool for the memory card is used to test how a game handles a full memory card.
This is exactly correct. We used similar
Tools to test how games would respond to full memory cards. Such as ensuring the proper messages would show, or even odd behaviors/crashes that could occur if the memory card was full and unable to write data too.
BigN had developers run a number of tools to validate certain conditions, and specific messages needed to be shown for each (card not present, corrupted, full, read errors, etc). That specific tool was used to introduce those errors. If I recall they were referred to as TCR. We ran those a lot in the latter days of dev of games to ensure we wouldn’t get a build rejected right off the bat (as dev/publishers paid for each submission).
@@YuviApp The last scenario is exactly what I would imagine the situation with the "destroy memory card" prompt, to test out how the game would behave with a broken/corrupted memory card.
What I assume it does, is forcefully corrupting a bunch (or very specific) files on it. If I'm wrong of course please correct it, it's really cool to learn these kinds of stuff.
This shit has to be expensive. I remember seeing that tower on eBay for 1700 dollars 5 years ago. I can’t imagine what it costs now.
Obviously
I sold this unit for €1120 in January
It's Nintendont hardware!! It's worth $2 because it's very slow and basic hardware compared to all other companies. Nintendo consoles have the game's but every other console has the best hardware.
Well yeah, you could make your own Game Cube game with it if you have the right skills.
Meanwhile Assembler has at least a dozen or more of these collecting dust in his basement.
Shoutouts to the Team 17 devs in Chelt & Ham
Ironically, Team17 is actually based in Wakefield. Acclaim Cheltenham was the studio formerly known as Probe IIRC.
FYI there’s also separate PAL NPDP reader, so you didn’t really try all regions. It was probably not a region issue, the slots on those carts were often full of junk data and busted builds.
FYI, the GDEV has 48MB of main RAM while the NPDP reader has the normal 24MB, so not everything on a NPDP cart will work on the NPDP reader. My understanding is the NPDP reader was intended more as an early QA tool where you can rapidly make changes rather than a way to play dev builds like the gdev
I was a tester back then. We used the NPDP carts/reader all the way through development, up to and including the excruciating Lot Check process. We only used the NR disks/reader during the mastering process, iirc we barely burnt a half dozen of them. The disks were expensive and unnecessary.
:3306
When I worked as a games tester in the early 2000s, I used this hardware daily.
Sweet!
What games did you test? (if you recall some)
Any trivia you can share?
Tell us more about it omg
"...clearly states to not open the unit. So, to open the unit..."
😅
@@MachoNachoProductions NR disk were mostly used for the final stage of QA before mass production
Heard you say “AM-TEL” and as a dyslexic who used to say it that way, i feel compelled to share that it’s “AT-MEL” 😅. Great video!❤
9:45 That's the predecessor CPU to the SEGA Dreamcast's main CPU, the SH-4. =O
No, that's an SH-3, which appears to be the only Hitachi SuperH chip to never be used by SEGA.
@@kitterbug If English is not your first language, please open a translator and look up what "predecessor" means. =P
Yeah, absolutely wild that all these years we've wondered what's inside NPDP carts, and it turns out it's a 6GB hard drive and a freakin' SH-3 🤯🤯 My jaw dropped
@@Kniffel101I misread your comment as processor, I apologize.
@@Kniffel101 it's weird, as soon as I saw it I thought "oh, that's from the Saturn" ...the Saturn had dual SH-2s and an SH-1 for the CD-ROM. the 32X had one SH-2. it really was the only one sega didn't use...
As for the SCSI in/out ports, I believe this was common in SCSI devices. I used to have a SCSI scanner, and it also had in/out ports. You could daisy chain devices as you said, but it wouldn't be limited to the Gangwriter (unless the card you showed also had some sort of limitation). Thanks for the insight, really cool video.
I have to wonder if it's actually just SCSI though. I can't think of any SCSI devices that need special hardware on the host side. Drivers, sure, but a bespoke SCSI host device that needed so much horsepower that it required its own CPU *and* FPGA? that's wild. I wonder what would have made that necessary, since it appears it was just a fancy disk array.
@@swolfington Yep, my guess is they're only using the physical interface due to it's bandwidth and signal integrity (hence keeping much of the physical protocol intact), but using a proprietary data set underneath, which the interface card handles.
@@swolfington My scanner did come with a PCI SCSI card because it wasn't a port that was available on most motherboards. This one does sound a bit over engineered for "just" SCSI.
@@gvfc My dad had one of those old SCSI scanners, and I remember the in/out ports well. Didn't expect to see them again in this context.
@@gvfc Sorry, i just meant special hardware beyond a typical SCSI host card. The strange thing is the one in the video doesn't even appear have a typical SCSI controller chip, though I guess the CPU or FPGA could probably have done the job (though that would be an expensive way to do it just for an SCSI controller). Even high end RAID SCSI cards didn't have that much horsepower afaik. They must have been doing something pretty special to need that kind of heavy lifting.
edit: i just realized i was misremembering, the CPU was on the NPD cartridge itself, not the pci card. still though, pretty exotic stuff. would be cool to know more about what they were actually doing.
This was phenomenal. Glad to see this stuff was documented.
😂😂
Even though the cable looks like a scsi cable, it’s not actualy using the scsi protocol. That being said, yes, you could daisy chain a couple gw to write more carts at the same time.
Any info on what it is, if it isn't SCSI?
The PCI card in summary has the large FPGA doing the SCSI-to PCI BUS transcoding. The LVC chips are logic level shifting, likely for 5V to 3.3V. The EEPROM holds the configuration for the larger fpga and the smaller CPLD is likely "helping" the larger FPGA. Perhaps lack of pins they needed extra control logic. You basically nailed it already; its a SCSI to PCI card.
Yeah, so it's basically a SCSI card. So what's so special about it? Why wouldn't they use an off-the-shelf SCSI card?
@@stefansynths custom SCSI commands OR the runs too fast/too slow for the actual spec
Looking at the traces between the altera cpld and the eeprom, i expect the cpld is responsible for copying the fpga configuration "bitstream" from the rom into the fpga at power-on.
Virtex / virtex2 series did not have very powerful self-loading abilities, so using a small micro or cpld to get them alive was common practice. Especially to program a large 1700 chip in time to talk PCI.
Funny that a Xilinx FPGA is used with an Altera CPLD, and not a Xilinx CoolRunner.. (the two companies hate each other)
I expect the "scsi" cable is not talking scsi at all. More likely it just offers many parallel high-speed wires, with a proprietary protocol on top.
@@SittingDuc Good insight! I'm used to modern FPGAs that will boot from QSPI, eMMC, SD card, JTAG, and more. Configuring in time for PCI enumeration is definitely a concern.
Tito just casually mentioning he doesn't know how Worms work is a stand-out moment 😄
9:39 It's SuperH series RISC CPU developed by Hitachi , this one is SH-3
Almost all "ham" in UK place names are pronounced "um".
One major exception being West Ham, for reasons.
And male name Graham, too?
Do you say gra ham or gra um when you say it slowly?
@@AlKaseltzer87 I do say "Grey-um", but I'm from the north, so I suppose maybe it varies region to region.
@@AlKaseltzer87 "Gray-um"
I was going to comment that it's pronounced Chelt-num, you beat me to it
"Hang on guys, I'll get you your build soon. Just gotta' fire up the GANGWRITER!" I'm sure people regularly said it just like that. Badassest name. 🤣
SCSI devices could be daisy chained and had to be terminated on the last device on the chain. SCSI was faster than IDE at the time, making it the superior interface for External drives, CD burners, etc. Some SCSI devices had auto termination as well.
The NR discs were used when the games were ready as the media was expensive. at the early stages of the game the cartridge was used. If I remember correctly the spindle of 25 discs was $250.
so $10 a disc, and GC games were... $40-$60? I didn't get a Gamecube when it was new.
4:35 A UK Portable Appliance Test or PAT test sticker. 🙂
Nice to see that you made a review from my old development kit (npdp-gw).
The picture that you showed is also from my Reddit.
Btw, probably bank 3 didn’t read because it’s possible a pal game. I saw it before on one of my npdp cartridges that they put a ntsc and a pal game together on it. If you’re interested for reviewing, I have a pal npdp reader still for sale.
The "missing link" would be the Silicon Graphics computer which was back in the day a very powerful machine used for graphics and video special effects and very very expensive piece of hardware. This would have created the form, the structure of the game, likely rendering the various polygons and visual effects, some companies had "locked" machines like Sega had for a while where it had built in the full array of development tools and extremely costly and remained more a loan than owning the machines. I remember seeing one at Codemaster's back when I was on the alpha team for Lotro and this chap said to me "don't touch it, don't breathe on it, don't even look at it cos if it breaks down again it will be on your shoulders it will fall", there were different types that were more graphic than computational and some who were more computational than graphical, most had MS Visual suites on as using a Visual compiler to knock up your code was the done thing with the old machine code programmers considered cavemen. BTW Cheltenham is pronounced "Chel-tenham" with the ten and ham rolled into one sound more a ummm than a pronounced "ham", think RTC has a museum to old gaming stuff around there.
Hey I remember having a chance to play with a silicon Graphics workstation back in the day during a stay at a summer program at Michigan Tech when I was quite Young my mind was just blown by what it could do compared to the average at that time.
Nowadays stuff at that time that was high as possible it seems like a Raspberry Pi could help me literally but it just seems like this like where phones put older laptops to shame that sort of thing not to mention costs have come down for some technology to be just everyday stuff that's way more advanced than what used to be thousands of thousands of dollars for something that was nowhere near Campbell as current Hardware is for a lot less cost
Yesterday I saw a Wata graded game get opened and today the inside of dev hardware. What a time to be alive!
You would think it has been open before if a dude like him can get his hands on it
WATA is a scam
To be fair WATA Grading is in bed with Heritage Auctions, HA being known for market fixing and manipulation. WATA is also known to do the same. I would open any WATA case just out of spite, garbage company.
Note: at 6:36 Macho Nacho says a serial number that is slightly different from the one on the left. The one he said, starting with EPM, is the correct one, not the one on the 'part number' line. Otherwise great video, keep it up!
That NPDP module looks like an objective item *from* an early 2000s video game! T handle and all
You channel is criminally underrated.
You channel is very underrated
Way to underrated.
I am assuming the game card qa tool was to test how the game saves to blocks to validate it doesn't corrupt other save data. QA probably used it to quickly fill up the card to make sure a save didn't overwrite other save data or cause other corruptions, testing many different scenarios, sizes, and brands (such as Nintendo official vs madcatz or something). Last thing you would want is to have saves corrupt its own or other games save data.
Team17... flashbacks of great Amiga games.
Funny thing is Team17 is still around and making worms games for modern consoles. My SO was playing the new worms game on the ps4, and I had to look into them at the time and the game because my firewall was breaking their crappy networking code somehow related to their in-game ads.
@@MikeButash They've also pivoted to indie publishing too.
@@TrollDeckerYep. Not the best publisher, IMHO, but yep. I have gripes with their ports... PC games ported on consoles seem to be of uneven quality. One game in particular got "forked" from a WAAAY to old version and the console customers are "stuck" with a lesser version.
Funny Cheltenham pronounciation, heh.
Like most British place names, it isn't pronounced how it's spelt and is more like "Chelt'num"
I've never played Worms 3D, but I have loved some other games in the franchise. Especially the one on Xbox Live Arcade, had a blast playing that one with my neighbor.
“so to open the unit” 😂💀
Fantastic video! I love getting little peaks behind the scenes like this!
Amazing stuff, Tito!
10:18 inb4 PH pride comes in.
Though to be fair, Toshiba HDDs are still being made here. I wonder if the partition inside that is readable in a PC and if you could swap that with a SSD?
There are IDE SSDs, though uncommon, and even then, there's converters. But that's laregly untested.
Please dump the whole contents of the carts. If you don't feel comfortable with releasing it yourself, I am very sure you can find some in the preservation community to do it.
The memory card tool was used to fill up memory cards with junk so you could test edge case scenarios where there wasn't enough storage left on the card. Your game had to handle this gracefully and not clobber other data on the card.
You mean Nintendont 🎉🎉
Genesis does what nintendont
@@OneLife69- Genesis denesis what nintendenesis
Why did you have to give it that stupid clickbait title? Why not title it "Rare GC development kits" ?
Seems like the NTSC-U build of Worms 3D. It was originally a Sega published title in Europe. Acclaim only had the rights to it in America.
As someone that lives in Cheltenham, it pains me to hear you mispronounce my lovely town’s name (drop the “H”, it sounds weird). It’s pronounced CHELT-EN-UM. PS on a side note, I had no idea that Acclaim had a studio here.
The label is called a PAT and stands for Portable Applience Test, and needs to be performed every 12 months if used in a public or work space in the UK.
If you think a region problem was stopping bank 1 from working, I'd assume it's a PAL region build, especially considering the fact that bank 0 has Worms 3D on it (Team 17, which develops the Worms series, is a British company). So the USA and Japan switch won't change that, since USA and Japan modes are both NTSC. Of course, it could also be that something just wasn't formatted correctly, or it was corrupted.
Difference between a NR disc(debug) and NROM disc(retail) is that the NR Disc has no BCA and uses a fixed key using discID(gameID+makerID) and fixed key number is 9
That's just a SCSI card bro...
I was a little surprised to see the hard drive inside of the cartridge, but then I remembered that the multi gigabyte capacity required to store four GCN disk images wouldn’t be economical with flash storage for at least another 15 years. Besides, speed isn’t an issue, as you’re going to want to emulate optical drive latency and throughput. The only reason I was really expecting flash memory in the cartridge is because I’m only used to seeing memory chips in one. (Usually ROM chips, though.)
5:42 "...clearly states not to open the unit. So, to open the unit..." lmao. Such a rebel.
I appreciate the documentation but the clickbait title is just gonna promote fearmongering, which is really annoying to deal with when I have to explain to people "No, Nintendo doesn't care that you downloaded roms" or whathaveyou.
I get it, gotta have the hustle and all that, just saying please keep in mind that these kinds of clickbait titles have lasting consequences, if not for how it's annoying for those of us who have to explain to people that there's nothing to be afraid of, then consider that it can scare people into not preserving or revealing stuff that they might have.
Tito + A = Taito. Your name sound like Taito with out a A in the Word.
Has all supplemental stuff that *could* be archived, been archived with these? That xilinx chip has to hold it's vhdl/verilog info somewhere, if you could dump that that would be incredible
So you're not making the prototypes (or better yet, raw dumps including the "corrupted" memory bank) available?
Given what on the "carts" I don't think it would be wise to risk it. Rom dumps are technically illegally already in many countries, but this is prerelease code that likely falls under a more protective legal standard.
@@silasmayes7954 Companies care less about prototypes than the actual games themselves. And no, there's countless people who shared prototypes online, and, unless it's by Nintendo, no company gives a damn about them.
@@silasmayes7954 LOL, no one cares dude. And you just release it to one of the well know places where these things are collected, shared and archived.
would love to see this too
@@silasmayes7954 Acclaim went out of business and Team17 looks like it is about to. nobody will come after him
EDIT: Probably not lol
Could someone take the way that FPGA is laid out and port it out to hardware the rest of us could use? FPGA Gamecube :O. MiSTer Cubed :O. Or maybe Its-A-Me-STer
"...so, to open the unit..."
Oh, how I lolled.
please stop with the god awful clickbait titles... a debug board is interesting but the cancer of a title is not...
EDIT: thank you! much better
I'd imagine the fourth bank is for testing reusable code for save data management to be implemented in games.
It'd make more sense to me do this rather than create bespoke backend file management tools on a per game basis, just create one and add a custom frontend to suit the game.
Also it'd be worth dumping the P-ROM on the cartridge and uploading the data somewhere imo, you never know it might help someone in the future
Super interesting! Thank you for securing and documenting it, Tito!!
Nintendo FBI Ninjas are assembling in 3...2...1...
More like the big Nintendo bullies....
Chell-ten-ham? That made me look up from my breakfast.
A collaboration with Hard4Games or a similar group to better explore the content on those carts if they haven't already been examined outside of this video would be pretty cool.
Tito you owe it to your self to check out worms 2 or Armageddon. Worms 3D was long past their prime.
It's kind of crazy, last devkit I've seen in a pci form was one of the PSX devkits
well very partial in this case
Instructed not to open it.
Proceeds to open it.
>label says "do not open"
>Tito opens it
I bet he also rips off the tags from pillows and mattresses!
You shoukd dump the HDD image on internet archive Tito, someone might still find something interesting on it.
Worms 3D was so fun to play with friends but the version I played back in the day was the PC one
There's another older game of the saga that's 2D, that was also good and highly recommended too
Besides the gamedev curiosities, how to pronounce SCSI is the most important information on this video.
I wonder if you could retrieve old builds of worms or other games from that hard drive trough fancy analysis techniques of deleted blocks of data (not sure what the proper term is)
Come on it should have been "What nintendon't want you to see"
I'm kind of disappointed you don't like Worms. That was an epic series back in the day.
Awesome video love the world of devkits, speaking of PCI. I would love to see you get into the world of retro computing, building or restoring a Retro PC for Windows 98, XP or DOS and games are super cheap to collect for. Would love to see your take on Retro PC gaming or even Micro Computers like the Amiga, Commodore 64 or the MSX2. It would be a nice change of pace compared to the usual consoles and handhelds. When it comes to retro pc's. I recommend going Pentium 3 era and before. Beyond that kind of goes into the modern era of PC gaming. LGR, MVG, Digital Foundry, 8BitGuy, Nostalgia Nerd, RMC, Phils Computer Lab, Linus, MJR are great channels that either covered that stuff, or based their channel around it. But there is a problem with older PC's are the caps, they are going bad and the parts are getting rarer and more expensive.
I actually just picked up my family’s old 486 when visiting my parents. I definitely plan to restore it!!
You've honestly never heard of Team17 before? Wild.
...I think the public is too surprised.
Is someone who grew up playing the GameCube this stuff is all super fascinating to me
The SCSI form factor was an addressable "Daisy Chain" format. So even things like a bed scanner would normally have an out. And, since computers back then probably couldn't handle 2 SCSI cards (the drivers would confuse each other) the out on the writer may have been used for something like a scanner. Just trying to pull info from my old brain.... Without a deep dive... The PCI card honestly just seems like a generic SCSI card. I'm guessing the software is the real key to it. Great VID !!!!!
npdp - only means no pneumatics in detached product nidiement
Sticker here says not to open the unit.... So to open the unit we ....
Crazy how the companies use to try to reinvent the wheel , that hardware maybe exist in another brand name as the original oem
Posting before the ad even finishes.
Love hearing people pronounce places from the UK. Cheltenham should sound like chel-tuh-nuhm.
Thanks for sharing this amazing piece of history!!
Just as a heads up, if a British place is named "X-enham", it's probably pronounced "X-enum" (not too much emphasis on the um - it's not like going "um" out loud) i.e. Cheltenham is pronounced cheltenum, Tottenham is pronounced tottenum, etc.
You are performing such an amazing service by documenting and sharing this info. It's well out of my wheel house but amazingly cool and I'm sure will help individuals far more skilled at developing for us fans to enjoy.
9:46
That's a Hitachi SuperH-3 specifically. I don't know much about the SH-3 in particular, but the SuperH RISC architecture was used in a handful of game consoles, arcade machines, and used a lot by SEGA. SEGA helped design the SH-2, two SH-2 CPUs are the main source of processing power in the SEGA 32X and SEGA Saturn! The Dreamcast is powered by a SH-4! The SH-3 seems to be the only SuperH chip not used by SEGA for anything!
Do you plan in building the ultimate modded gamecube?
I'm curious if the special hardware makes the games run any faster
Pronounce it Cheltnam, great vid btw
Not a developer, however I am familiar with the hardware.
When I worked at Nintendo Of America in Redmond, WA. I remember they had a little museum of Nintendo history in the testing and development building. Additionally they had a shelf of unreleased and unused hardware that had been developed and canceled in the tech support buildings QC department.
I also downloaded this. This is so freaking cool!
The title could be
NintenDon't want you to see this