The MO5.COM association works for the preservation of digital heritage, and this involves safeguarding (or Backup) of development kits that have been used in the industry, which means that from time to time you can get your hands on "unreleased"The aim is to provide researchers with an archive of (non-commercialised) copies of games that are more or less well-known.

Thanks to a new and experienced member of the association, we were able to get our hands on 3 Katana development kits (for the Sega Dreamcast console), two of which were working, and read and save all the data on their 8 GB SCSI hard disks. To do this, we called in an external expert, as we sometimes do when we have such specific needs, in the person of Mickaël Cardoso, who has since become a member of the association. Mickaël has been working for over 10 years on the preservation of games and game prototypes for the Sega Dreamcast in an international group of enthusiasts.

So we welcomed Mickaël to our collections storage room to inspect the three Katana development kits, dump their hard drives and analyse their contents to determine whether they contain data (prototype games, non-final versions, etc.) of games that will in turn be archived for the community.

Our three development kits will be scrutinised to find out what they contain.

Mickaël, who is used to making hard disk dumps of these development kits, came to see us with his own pre-configured dump hardware, so as not to waste time finding a working PC with a compatible SCSI controller card.

Mickael set up his equipment and began dismantling our Dreamcast development kits (code name Katana).

Dreamcast Development Kits are very special pieces of hardware, using a Dreamcast-compatible motherboard but with more memory in particular, and more expansion options, such as a native RJ45 network card. They come in the form of small PC cases with the same kind of power supply, an average 8GB SCSI hard disk and an unconventional GDROM drive (which is very different from the one used in game consoles).

The SCSI disk is now fully available and can be connected to a PC using a SCSI card. Its contents can now be dumped under Linux in exFAT format.

Typically, a Linux backup of a SCSI hard disk takes a few minutes. However, we did have a few scares when making the dumps, as the old hard disks in the kits had not been running for several years!

A simple PC running Linux but equipped with a good SCSI card of the time and compatible with the kits' hard disk (in this case a good old Adaptec) can access the contents of the disk.

Mickaël therefore took three dumps home to analyse their content in peace and quiet, and quickly got back to us with the following analysis:

• Katana 1 : There is a version of Donald Couac Attack for Dreamcast ("Master 25") very close to release, just 2 days before the release date.
• Katana 2 : This Katana contains the 'Master 23' version of the same game, dated 16 November, around 4 days before release.
• Katana 3 : There is no exploitable Donald (but there was, the data is destroyed) on the other hand, there is a demo of Rayman 2 for the magazine Dream On USA. What's more, there's a ton of internal documentation (some of it written by members of the company) and the strangest thing of all... the source code for an N64 Kart game dating back to 1999. Surely a port in the works or actually made?"

Updated on 19/03/2021: 

Thanks to our friend and association member Laurent Comby, we have an image of the N64 Kart game running on the N64 emulator! Thanks to Mickaël and him for giving us a chance to see what this prototype or project looks like:

The dumps have, of course, been backed up on our NAS, and the association will certainly be continuing its work of archiving the content of rare machines or development kits that come into the collection for the benefit of the community.

Philippe Dubois, Association MO5.COM, Chairman