This is a Proprietary N64 Development SRAM cartridge developed by Rare Ltd. It was designed to replace the Ultra64 development boards which were apparently notoriously unstable and always breaking down. They also were extremely expensive as they required an SGI Indy workstation. Rare wanted to have their own Debugger that could be used with both SGI and PC systems. So the RARE N64DEV V3 cartridge was designed with a SCSI-2 interface.
These cartridges were designed and built by former Electronics Design Engineer and Rare Ltd. Employee Marc Green.
You can watch an in-depth interview I conducted with Mr. Green posted further below. We discuss the construction of this Dev cartridge and talk about his time working at Rare Ltd. during the 90’s.
The Embedded video is posted further below:
As shown below, there was a board socket located at the Top on the back side for inserting Flash memory daughter boards. These were used for storing Savegame data during testing.
Various CIC chips were stored inside these DE9 connector enclosures (Shown below) providing a CIC “DONGLE” that would interface to a DE9 socket located on the top side of the Dev cartridge.
A CIC chip could also be inserted into a DIP-16 socket that was located on the bottom side of the Dev cart PCB. However, these dongles were very convenient for quick swapping of the CIC chips.
Here is an in-depth interview I conducted with Mr. Green on the construction of the “RARE N64DEV V3” N64 development cartridge and his time working at Rare Ltd. during the 90’s.