Dryden on 29 December 2007
| Melissa said: Possible explanation for serial plug: it was for a prototype devkit... which probably had a lot of PC components. Particularly because the whole Sony move was intended to make the Nintendo machine more PC-like. Remember what Genesis ports looked like? I think it's completely reasonable. |
Many of the dev stations of that era were ISA daughtercards that ran inside off-the-shelf PCs or Macs. The entire architecture of the console was reproduced on a single card to run under a shell on a computer. In the case of the 3DO, for example, the dev process was done on a Macinstosh. The "dev console" was just a regular old Panasonic FZ-1 with dip switches accessible from the back to run the software unencrypted.
You built on the Mac, burnt the build to a CD-R, then popped that into the console to test.
The controllers used a serial-style interface, though the pin-out is unique for most consoles.
