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The SNK Millennium; SNK's 2000 era cancelled console...exists!

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)
 
S

SpongebobSquaredance

Unconfirmed Member
oh I kinda thought this was going to be a console version of the Hyper Neo Geo 64.
 

VGEsoterica

Member
oh I kinda thought this was going to be a console version of the Hyper Neo Geo 64.
No. Entirely different :)

I don't think the Hyper could have ever come home. The wild amount of custom ASICs on that board would have been a nightmare to fit into a console not to mention the cost of putting out a console with THAT MANY individual chips. It would have made the AES look CHEAP by comparison had it actually come home.

No surprise SNK went licensed CPU and computer GPU for Millennium. Cheap and simple
 

VGEsoterica

Member
I didn't know about this! And I know everything.

The late 90's really were the golden age of gaming. I wish I could go back.
It was just a blurb / quick mention by SNK in 97/98. It came and went within months. By the time they probably got serious they were in serious financial trouble with the Hyper Neo Geo being a flop and probably realized the project was beyond what they could afford.

So you have a left over R&D board where they were testing technology for Millennium
 

modiz

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)

Which chips are on it?
Edit: it's in the video.
 
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McCheese

Member
My heart sank when you said the boot/bios rom doesn't have anything interesting on it, do you know what it sets the program counter to once it's booted up? as from that you could deduce if it's booting from the ICE or a HDD based on the memory bus layout, my hot-take would be if it's booting from the ICE ROM then it's a console development kit of some sort, but if it boots from a HDD it's likely an arcade or PC debug system.

But this early on in the prototype stage they are probably just injecting the code via a serial port or something from a unix dev kit, it looks like a very early SH-4 prototype and probably wasn't even paired up with a specific graphics card by this point. I wonder if you can tell from the wear and tear on the pins what sort of devices they plugged into it.

Can't wait for the next video.
 
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VGEsoterica

Member
My heart sank when you said the boot/bios rom doesn't have anything interesting on it, do you know what it sets the program counter to once it's booted up? as from that you could deduce if it's booting from the ICE or a HDD based on the memory bus layout, my hot-take would be if it's booting from the ICE ROM then it's a console development kit of some sort, but if it boots from a HDD it's likely an arcade or PC debug system.

But this early on in the prototype stage they are probably just injecting the code via a serial port or something from a unix dev kit, it looks like a very early SH-4 prototype and probably wasn't even paired up with a specific graphics card by this point. I wonder if you can tell from the wear and tear on the pins what sort of devices they plugged into it.

Can't wait for the next video.
Well “nothing interesting” as in nothing that plain text says “Millennium” lol

looks like (and I haven’t finished the work. Not even like 10%) it boots from ICE then requests two specific files from the C drive. Irda and Uart. But it’s not booting from C:

Thats all I’ve determined outside of the plain text error notes that can occur during self-test. They are all very non-specific
 

VGEsoterica

Member
Great find, too bad it doesnt boot
Yeah it’s a bit of a bummer. Without the ICE rom or the original hard drive it’s a bit of a showpiece only. I mean I guess if you worked hard enough you might get a SH-4 compatible version of Linux running but it’s not like it would be anything special
 
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