What exactly was this Dev board used for?

[JBAOXXS]

Received this as a bonus item from a seller that sold me a Mortal Kombat proto. Was told from the seller this was the board used during the development of the game. Trying to find out some more information on it. What company produced this item? What is missing to make a complete setup? What purpose did it serve for developers? Any help would be much appreciated.

[Memblers]

Looks like a ROM emulator on an ISA card. If so, you'd put it in PC, upload your program to the on-board RAM, then that ribbon cable would either connect to a modified SNES, a modified cartridge, or (my guess) most likely a custom SNES cartridge.

It needs the PC software, and needs an SNES cartridge. If there was anything special on the SNES cartridge, then you're kinda stuck. If the signals on the ribbon cable just look like big ROM, then it wouldn't be too difficult to hook it up.

[JBAOXXS]

Looks like a ROM emulator on an ISA card. If so, you'd put it in PC, upload your program to the on-board RAM, then that ribbon cable would either connect to a modified SNES, a modified cartridge, or (my guess) most likely a custom SNES cartridge.

It needs the PC software, and needs an SNES cartridge. If there was anything special on the SNES cartridge, then you're kinda stuck. If the signals on the ribbon cable just look like big ROM, then it wouldn't be too difficult to hook it up.

Thanks for the quick reply it was very informative and makes sense. This was along the lines of what I had thought but wanted to confirm it.

[Memblers]

I remembered seeing Sculptured Software featured in Nintendo Power (they ported Mortal Kombat to SNES), so I looked it up. It's in vol 36 (Darkwing Duck cover), page 96. There's a picture where you can see one of the programmers' desks, there's what looks like a black ribbon cable plugged into a Super Famicom cartridge. Could just as well be any other type of ROM emulator, and it's just a small picture, but I figured you might find it interesting.

Would be interesting if there was a better picture of that board, so we could see the chip types and date codes on them. Then we can maybe take a guess about when it was produced. I doubt we'll ever know who made it though, if there aren't any markings on the board.

[cdoty]

Received this as a bonus item from a seller that sold me a Mortal Kombat proto. Was told from the seller this was the board used during the development of the game. Trying to find out some more information on it. What company produced this item? What is missing to make a complete setup? What purpose did it serve for developers? Any help would be much appreciated.

That looks like a Romulator, a homebrew SNES/Genesis rom emulator. Unfortunately, you need the interface boards for it to be of any use.

If the little tags say P1 and P2, or something like that, it is most likely a Romulator.