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MrVCD
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I got a Genesis copier that plays SMS roms. Anyone care to help me reverse engineer it?
 Posted: Mon May 15, 2000 11:41 am
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I have a device called a Super Magic Drive which copies Sega Genesis games to floppy/PC and plays Sega Genesis games from floppy/PC. The great thing about this unit is that it plays SMS roms.
This unit is EXTREMELY rare (I have one but I will not get rid of mine). Is there anyone with the technical knowledge that will help me reverse engineer this thing? I would be glad to help in any way I can.
The reason why I am asking is becuase I really like backup units/copiers and I would rather play roms on a real system. I also want others to do the same. It would really help the SMS community as my unit seems to play any SMS rom including Street Fighter 2, and SMS demos and hacks.
Hopefully we can get something going
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- Joined: 28 Sep 1999
- Posts: 1197
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Re: I got a Genesis copier that plays SMS roms...
Posted: Mon May 15, 2000 4:16 pm
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Quote > This unit is EXTREMELY rare (I have one but I will not get rid of mine). Is there anyone with the technical knowledge that will help me reverse engineer this thing? I would be glad to help in any way I can.
You can run Game Gear games as well, but with no start button,
and incorrect colors. It would also be very interesting to see
what happens if you ran a SMS game that was patched so it
was forced to use FM sound, since when in SMS mode on the
Genesis, you can access the YM2612 sound chip (which is nothing
like the YM2413, but it would be neat if it was wired up to
the same addresses)
It's too bad that FFE never released any information about
the Super Magic Drive, else somebody could write a program to
dump the BIOS, and either write it to disk or send it through
the parallel port. Of course if the BIOS was dumped, this kind
of thing could be figured out, but getting it is the problem.
I've been told, btw, that the Super Magic Drive software runs
entirely in the SMS mode, which would explain why the SMD format
is broken up into 8K chunks, since that's all the memory that's
available at any given time.
What would be cool is if you were willing to run programs
people have written and see how they operate on a "real" SMS.
Like the Tetris, Nibbles, and SMS Power demo various people
on this forum have created.
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Mark
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Re: I got a Genesis copier that plays SMS roms...
Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2000 12:32 am
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Charles Mac Donald wrote:
Quote > It's too bad that FFE never released any information about
> the Super Magic Drive, else somebody could write a program to
> dump the BIOS, and either write it to disk or send it through
> the parallel port. Of course if the BIOS was dumped, this kind
> of thing could be figured out, but getting it is the problem.
Most game copiers have their BIOS code in an EPROM, don't they? If an owner of one of these backup units could remove the BIOS EPROM and read the data from it, then it could be reverse-engineered.
-- Mark
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