Hi, I am a long time lurker but I could do with some advice as I am stuck identifying this. To me this looks like it is potantially a retail sega saturn unit with a saturn interface control unit wire coming out of the front and what could be a power mod? on the rear. I am unsure what the dial is on the bottom left of the unit? it looks a little untidy for a retail unit (unless it was intended to be buried within a cabinet) Apologies for the pics, this unit isn't mine but I am trying to get a price sorted with the seller.
It's a dev unit. The cable on the front is the NMI cable. The rotary switch is a region selector. I'm not sure about the cable on the back - I've seen it before but I don't know what it is connected to.
Awesome! thanks for the info, I haven't seen one of the region selectors before. I thought this may not be Dev kit as it doesn't have the cross Sega CD switch on the side, and just the fact I haven't seen a black one before.
I've seen a few of them, they seem to have been produced by Sega Europe to supply to people that wanted a Cartdev system without the CD emulator.
The rotary region selector is like that because the Saturn has a 4-bit region field. It has 16 total regions, of which half the entries are defined, 6 are reserved, 2 are "do not set/invalid". Japan, USA, and Europe are 1, 4, 12 (C in hexadecimal), respectively. 2 is "Asia NTSC", and is used on the Samsung Saturns. If you hold L or R on the controller while booting, the system will show the currently set region code in the corner. Note that if you set something else other than those, the system might default to another number, I think 1...