Recently acquired a super magic drive, and know very little about them. I have found some forums which go into length about various problems with battery leakage etc. but i was hoping someone on this forum might be able to answer a couple of questions i have. 1) My magic drive did not come with the parallel floppy disk drive, i have seen on ebay various amiga external disk drives that look similar, does anyone know if these are compatible, or are they wired differently? 2) same as the above, would a parallel corded cd drive work? 3) one of the reasons i got this drive was to dump some early beta releases and homebrew games, that i have acquired over the years, The copier ram is only the stndard 8bit any ideas how i can upgrade this, when the modules are very hard to come by, i am only after a 16 or maybe a 24 whatever i can get hold of.
according to info on the web you can just connect it directly to the pc, no need for drives, you just need a paralel port on the pc
1) Wired very differently. Regular LPT floppies have extensive and unique logic inside the unit so that they may actually interface a floppy with the port. FFE floppies however just wire the drive directly to the connector, there's not much else in it besides a power supply. This makes it pretty simple to build your own FFE floppy, but in my opinion it's not worth it since SMD don't hold much value these days. 2) Not even close. The only FFE unit supporting a CDROM is the SWCDX2, released 5 years after the SMD, and it only supports parallel "CDROM" (you can actually use other storage mediums) via one specific IDE<->parallel chip. 3) That is 8 MEGAbit = 1 Megabyte. The modules actually aren't too hard to come by, but you can't upgrade an 8 Megabit unit to 24 or 32M, it requires upgrades to the board which nobody but FFE 10+ years ago could perform. It doesn't matter though because you don't need ANY RAM to dump games with a SMD; they need nothing more than the working RAM of the console. All you need to dump your games is a parallel port computer, "straight through" DB-25 cable and a properly set up uCON64. That is you can dump your games provided they follow Sega's basic mapping scheme and don't do anything like be >16M, have EEPROM, have a mapper etc. BTW "dumping homebrew"? That's a new one to me lol
wow, this brings back memories. I used to own one of these babies in '93 and also its snes counterpart. great you still managed to find one
hi guys thank you for your comments & PM's, this is the first one i have seen for sale but i have never really searched for them as i prefer to collect original carts :thumbsup:
hi Calpis, thanks for answering some questions that i could not find the answers to on the other forums, you saved me money through not buying any old external amiga floppy disk drives or cd units Okay, is it possible then to hook this unit up, to an external hard drive? though the majority i have seen are all obviously usb? One rumour is that some guy converted a usb lead to connect the SMD straight to a laptop but it was a very old post on a forum. On a final note if anyone has any of the spare upgrade ram boards, even if it a mall upgrade, anything has got to be better than the standard 8m board that i have, please PM me, and i will offer you some good money for it.. and i have some early beta release games i was hoping to dump and the bootleg/ homebrews not my work - Games like sonic shuffle, columns 4, final fantasy which i picked up in singapore, thought someone might enjoy...
No, it doesn't support anything but a floppy drive. You can also transfer games via PC parallel port. That's it. You can't use any existing USB->parallel adapters since they only implement printer protocol. It would take a special-purpose USB adapter to achieve any reasonable speed sending to the unit and AFAIK such a thing doesn't exist. Some 8M units can be upgraded to 16M, others cannot, it depends on the non-upgradeable logic firmware. I probably wouldn't take the chance and sink more money into it. SMD, much less 8M SMD just aren't worth much anymore. Remember that all you need to dump games is an older PC with parallel port and uCON64, and again the RAM size is irrelevant for dumping.
Just found this txt file on my harddisk, maybe you can use the info. SMD_floppy_pinout.txt Any PC 3.5 inch FDD 5V 1A power supply Case Making the cable: FFE D-sub 25 pin ------------FDD 34pin 1, 18-25-----------------------ALL ODD pin (GND) 2-------------------------------8 (Index) 3-------------------------------26(TR00) 4-------------------------------28(WP) 5-------------------------------30(RD) 6-------------------------------34(DC) 7-9----------------------------No Connection 10-----------------------------10(DS1) 11-----------------------------16(MOTOR ON 1) 12-----------------------------22(WD) 13-----------------------------24(WE) 14-----------------------------No Connection 15-----------------------------32(HS) 16-----------------------------18(DIR) 17-----------------------------20(STEP)
I have both the copier and the floppy. I also remember vividly using it both via parallel cable and with floppy. It required some weird file wormat for floppies, but there is a tool to convert (con64 or something like that). Anyway, if you still struggle, I could check the floppy drive for wiring. I also had battery removed, as it started leaking and damaged a small area of PCB. You probably want to do that as well Oh yeah, I found it only worked well with my shortest 3 feet parallel cable. 6 feet or more didn't work Also I flashed an EPROM with latest greatest firmware version (4.1) since my unit had older version (details here: http://www.smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6920&highlight=super+magic+drive+bios). I can probably do that for you if you're on the older version. What firmware version do you have?
thank you for your input. i think my firmware is 3.4g. my magic drive doesn't always boot - mostly get a black screen but i will give you a pm as i have a couple of questions maybe you can help me with. thanks
