VGEsoterica
Member
Anyone remember the rumors of SNK developing a console in 1998 that was meant to compete against Sony, Nintendo and Sega? Magazines mentioned it back in the day and the ex-head of SNK said they were working on a new platform? Yeah that was quietly cancelled due to SNK hemorrhaging money back then and eventually being sold entirely.
Well...it actually did exist in the prototype stage...and here it is!
Eurogamer picked a story up on it as as well from a preservation standpoint.
But I guess the rumors held more weight than anyone probably though. Sadly the board is nothing more than a paperweight as it's missing an ICE rom (In Circuit Emulator)
Rumors were it was meant to use a Matrox GPU which makes sense considering you see all the PCI expansion ports on the motherboard itself. Most likely to quickly test different GPU's to see where the sweet spot was on price vs performance.
The BIOS dump references file paths to a C: drive as well, so it was definitely setup to use some form of PC environment as far as development is concerned. Zero executable files exist unfortunately so even if I had any idea what the OS would be and got it on and booting something...I'd have nothing to throw at it
But as far as a rare, never seen oddity is concerned...it's pretty fun. SNK really was developing an arcade board and home console to come out in the year 2000 (due Conan O'Brien reference)
Well...it actually did exist in the prototype stage...and here it is!
Eurogamer picked a story up on it as as well from a preservation standpoint.
Video game collector believes he's found evidence of unreleased SNK Millennium console
A video game collector has come across what is believed to be evidence of the "SNK Millennium" console - 20 years after…
www.eurogamer.net
But I guess the rumors held more weight than anyone probably though. Sadly the board is nothing more than a paperweight as it's missing an ICE rom (In Circuit Emulator)
Rumors were it was meant to use a Matrox GPU which makes sense considering you see all the PCI expansion ports on the motherboard itself. Most likely to quickly test different GPU's to see where the sweet spot was on price vs performance.
The BIOS dump references file paths to a C: drive as well, so it was definitely setup to use some form of PC environment as far as development is concerned. Zero executable files exist unfortunately so even if I had any idea what the OS would be and got it on and booting something...I'd have nothing to throw at it
But as far as a rare, never seen oddity is concerned...it's pretty fun. SNK really was developing an arcade board and home console to come out in the year 2000 (due Conan O'Brien reference)