This development cartridge seems to have been used by The Code Monkeys and is Accolade made. Lots of epoxy all over the chips, which certainly makes the board harder to repair or reverse engineer. Whether that was intentional, protective, or both, I don’t know. A few of the capacitors on the front of the board have come loose, probably due to getting stuck on the door flaps of a Mega Drive a few too many times. If you know anything more about this cartridge, please leave a comment here! :)

The card itself is quite fashionable, especially as it was from a third party publisher.

Above is the intro that appears when the cartridge is inserted into a functioning Sega Mega Drive.

Next up we have the Accolade silkscreen on the PCB that was blacked out with what appears to have been a marker pen.

Finally the interesting 9 pin cable hanging off might have been due to a game known as Zero Tolerance as was pointed out by one YouTube commenter.

Zero Tolerance supported connecting two Mega Drives through their second controller ports. Technopop later stated that its proprietary two-player Network Link Cable had been offered free with purchases of the game, and published the wiring needed to build one.

Accolade’s development manual also describes a PC-to-console connection as part of its development system. Neither that manual nor Zero Tolerance’s link feature establishes what the 9 pin lead on this particular cartridge was for. That connection was a suggestion from a commenter, not something I established at the time.

So there you have it, a piece of history!

Sources