Super Magic Drive

From Sonic Retro

Super Magic Drive, sitting in a European Mega Drive.

The Super Magic Drive, manufactured by Front Far East, is a copier that dumps game cartridge info to four different types of floppy disks or to a PC directly via a parallel port. These files come in SMD format, which in turn can be used on an emulator. In addition, putting different floppy disks in the Super Magic Drive allows them to be playable on the Sega Genesis. It also has features for supporting battery-backed RAM present in some game cartridges, as well as providing functions for disk management. With an adapter, the Super Magic Drive can copy and play SNES games too. Another allows PC Engine games to be copied, but the games have to be loaded from the external disk drive every time instead of being able to play them from the memory. In addition, the Super Magic Drive serves as a Japanese/North American/European ROM converter.

Technical Specifications

8 Megabits RAM (1MEG) onboard (expandable to 16Mbit) From simple research online, you can find that some units are 24MBit. It has also been said that FFe at one stage even offered a service to upgrade SMDs to 32MBit.
256k Battery Backed RAM (save to disk for RPG games etc.)
3.5" High Density Disk controller (drive supplied) 720/800k/1.44/1.6Meg
PC-Link interface through parallel port for editing/uploading/download files
Auto-download cartridge to disk - or play cartridge directly
DOS can be updated by disk (ala Kickstart image files)
Utility included to allow conversion to and from Multi Game Doctor files

When formatted to 1.6 Meg, one can have three games per disk (4Mbit each) or TWO games (one 8Mbit game and one 4Mbit game) or even six 2Mbit games.

BIOS

BIOS Revisions
BIOS Version	Download
v3	Super Magic Drive BIOS v3 ^(info)
v3.1g	Super Magic Drive BIOS v3.1g ^(info)
v4.1a	Super Magic Drive BIOS v4.1a ^(info)

Notes on use

If your SMD did not come with the floppy drive (LocalH's didn't), you can make use of the COM I/O port by purchasing a standard 25-pin male-to-male parallel cable. A printer cable with a 36-pin Centronics port will not work. Also, you will have to make sure your parallel port is set to either EPP or ECP/EPP.

Utilities

ROM Backup Device Utility, GUI, includes io.dll for direct parallel port access on NT-based Windows, can convert BINs to SMD on the fly
uCON64, CLI, frontends available, requires external I/O port driver for NT-based Windows, available from site, requires SMD format ROM, provides conversion facility
Charles MacDonald's SMD Utility, CLI, for MS-DOS, requires external I/O port driver for NT-based Windows, requires SMD format ROM, can also load some SMS ROMs

Special Thanks

Charles MacDonald

Sega Mega Drive Hardware
Mega Drive and Variations	Mega Drive \| Genesis 3 \| Mega Jet \| Nomad \| Teradrive \| LaserActive
Mega CD and Variations	Mega CD \| CDX \| X'eye \| Aiwa Mega CD
Other Add-ons	32X \| Power Base Converter \| Super Magic Drive
Game Controllers	Standard gamepad \| Mega Mouse \| Menacer \| Activator
Online Services	Meganet \| Channel \| XB∀ND
Misc. Hardware	Sega Mega Anser \| MegaPlay \| Mega-Tech \| Game Genie \| Action Replay \| Tototek MD-Pro
Embedded Units	Legends Series \| AtGames Mega Drive Video Game Console \| Mega Drive Portable Video Game Player Blaze Sega Mega Drive \| Blaze Dual Game Controller Player \| Mega Drive 3