That is interesting. Perhaps you might be willing to disassemble it and share some photos? My first guess would be that it's an SPI programming interface to burn the microprocessor. That seems a bit overkill though because most of the differences between the standard controllers seem to involve only discrete components. Perhaps the regen code is a bit more complex and requires different versions for each controller offered.
If you could ID the microprocessor and trace the USB connections to it (possibly through a USB host controller IC), we might be able to tell (by the micro's pinout and datasheet) which resources it is connected to.
