A Look Inside
Inside the unit, there is a backplane board mounted to the bottom of the case, that provides six interface slots that have the same number of pins and bus design as NuBus connectors. The most complicated unit known to date has four of these slots occupied. This same board also provides the unit with an expansion connector on the bottom of the case, identical to that of the SNES.
The inside the most complex unit consists of a main logic board, which has all the components of a Super Nintendo on it, including the SNES 65816 CPU, PPUs, and Work Ram. This board also has the SCSI controller and an NEC V20 processor, and additionally a 32k EPROM chip.
Examining the ROM chip at the Reset vector shows a JMP instruction outside the memory mapped location of the chip.
All known Emulator SE's also have a position on this board where a Standard SNES-RF Encoding Unit could be mounted, to provide an external RF port (identical to that of the Super Nintendo) just above the "Multi-Out" port, however no known specimens have this port installed.
This board also includes a connector for a standard Super Nintendo APU Module which is connected by wires to the next board up, which is the board which contains the MIDI and RCA connector. This audio board has many RAM chips, totaling 2 MB in size. The audio board also has many analog-to-digital converters. This board also has a 32k EPROM chip, but it is soldered to the board and could not be safely removed for investigation.
Above that board is the board that presents the RGB port. It connects only to the NuBus-style connector and has another significant amount of RAM on it.
Above that board is the cartridge board, which contains ram totaling 32 Mb worth or ram (4 MB), which was the maximum size cartridge the Super Nintendo could support without the use of special addressing chips. These RAM chips were all socketed. The board has a separate set of 8 chips that seem to be a storage area with a battery backup, perhaps similar to the battery backed up data on a Super Nintendo Cartridge.
This board also had three empty chip slots, and one nearby populated with a Nintendo DSP1 chip.
Another Emulator SE shows this board with only 16 Mb of memory installed, and no DSP1 chip.
All of the boards bear the designation "Intelligent Systems ICE". The acronym probably means "In-Circuit Emulator."
Read more about this topic: Super Nintendo Emulator SE
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