SEGA CHIHIRO xbox ?

[professor_jonny]

http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=729

http://segaretro.org/Sega_Chihiro

http://newastrocity.wordpress.com/2013/ ... a-chihiro/

has any one seen one of these before ?

[hawsey]

Interesting machine , never even heard of it , looks a strange beast .

[xman]

has any one seen one of these before ?

Yep, I have a few at work I work on. The Big Arsed Xbox Rear projector is from a Ghost Squad we just wrote off. We still have one operating ATM. I have an Outrunner 2 twin car cab still operating on site that will be itself written off shortly and there is a Maxitune 2 in the workshop we will be stripping in the next couple of weeks. Are you after parts?. All our SEGA CHIHIROs had the GP rom drives replaced with the solid state HDD mod which makes them much faster booting and best of all, no laser to die. They are good, reliable hardware as to be expected with any Sega product however, what usually kills them is over heating. Funny how the Xbox has overheat protection of the main chips but these do not. If the fan dies on an Xbox, it shuts down. These do not and it kills them. I change the fans on my CHIHIROs about once a year and that is the only reason I still have a few operating in my centers I look after. The last Ghost Squad is in Canberra and I won't be there real soon but the Out Runners 2 is in Sydney. I can grab some pics of it if you wish so you can see how Sega laid the hardware out and also the solid state HDD mod we did. Shame the Initial D 3 car cab I have at home was the later Sega Rosso powered system, I could have taken those pics right now.

[xman]

Here's some pics I took of the Chihiros-
This is the main box and the original GDRom player. When we mod them with the SSD, you don't use the GDRom player any longer.


Side views.


We use the VGA output for the video. In the top right corner of the top silver metal plate you can see a rectangular black thing. This is the Sega security chip to stop pirating and modding, supposedly anyway. To upload the hacked software to allow the updated software to allow the SSD mod, this security chip itself had to be hacked. You swap it with the hacked security chip, put in the SSD and sata to IDE adapter, upload the software via the GDRom driver from a disc, load it, remove the disc, swap the security chip back to the original and boot. Switch machine back off and remove the GDRom.



Only one memory slot used on this game. It is 512mB. You can run twin 512mB memory sticks to take it to 1024mB at least. I haven't been able to find out the maximum the board can handle. I'll keep asking to satisfy my own curiosity though.


Sega's Outrunner 2.


Everything is stored under the seat. One Chihiro per machine with a network cable via a switch allowing the two machines to link.


This particular machine has the SSD mod done to it and therefore the GDRom isn't connected. You can see the cables disconnected. The SSD is inside the Chihiro case and attaches to the Chihiro board via a IDE to Sata adapter. We to had a drama finding compatible IDE to Sata adapters.


This is the IO board. It allows the pedal and steering, feedback motor for the steering, coin mech etc to interface with the Chihiro.


Any other pics needed, let me know. The Sata SSD is 80GB I think I remember. Been a while since I did the mod.

[Xphazer]

Only one memory slot used on this game. It is 512mB. You can run twin 512mB memory sticks to take it to 1024mB at least. I haven't been able to find out the maximum the board can handle.

I feel the need to precise, this is not traditional RAM at all and it's a common misconception when talking of these machine.
The "512MB" on these machine are some kind of RAM drive, not regular RAM! Its used to load the entire contain of the GD-ROM.

The main system memory, at 128 MB, is twice that of a retail Xbox. In addition to this memory, the Chihiro also has additional RAM used for media storage - this was initially 512 MB but is upgradable to 1 GB. When the system is booted, the required files are copied from the GD-ROM to the RAM on the media board.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Se ... ga_Chihiro

[professor_jonny]

i believe the ram may also be used for the video upscaling from rgb@ 15hz to 30 hz of the arcade monitor, there is some magic envolved in that on the media board.

[xman]

I have no idea about that PJ. Even with the SSD in place, the machine still takes about 2 minutes to fully fire up but it does shit like turn the steering wheel by itself to calibrate the steering pot etc. Seeing as the GDRom is only capable of discs up to 1.2GB, (twice that of a CD because it reads at half the speed of a standard CD and therefore doubles the capacity), I can't imagine the "Media Ram" is only used for just the game loading. just seems a silly idea to read the game disc, put it to the Ram and then read it. We only use the VGA output for the screen and the screens we use are usually 70 HTz or 120HTz but all Sega devices including the consoles output VGA natively. Not sure of the HTz.

[asbo]

just seems a silly idea to read the game disc, put it to the Ram and then read it.

The GDRom probably isn't fast enough to have the game loaded from it in real time, so its dumped onto a RAM drive which would have very fast read speeds. With the SSD mod you do it probably is fast enough to be loaded as its played.
I love all these quite complex solutions they had to come up with to get around hardware limitations at the time, then something like an SSD comes along and makes its all redundant