Mega Drive Research & Development Center

I know it doesn't belong to the Members Longue, but I was quite unsure where to put it as there isn't any subforum about generic Mega Drive development. Move this wherever it should go.

Anyways, I just opened a new Mega Drive development page. I know there are a lot out there, but they normally have very little information (having all the tech docs makes no good to me XD), and anyways I wanted to make mine. Feel free to give feedback. This was rushed so more stuff will come soon (I.e. tomorrow), and the design isn't finished yet. Go and take a look at it.

http://srb2town.sepwich.com/md/

 

Are you talking about a MD dumper? You need to make hardware that reads the cartridge as if it was the real console. The data is then retrieved by this hardware somehow to the computer, where specialized software (which also controls the hardware) uses to make a binary file with the ROM dump. You would need the pin layout for a cartridge, and I don't have it :P

If you're talking about doing the opposite, then things become harder. You either need hardware to emulate a cartridge or a real cartridge. This hardware should have memroy where the ROM would be stored. Again, you would need the pin layout, but this time the software should write into the hardware memory. If you want it to be a back-up device, this memory has to be permanent also, making things harder (of course you could use Flash memory). A Tototek device does all this, just has a larger memory so it can store several ROMs.

And by the way, I'll add more examples today. But can somebody help me with this please? There's something I can't get working properly as for some reason works wrongly under Gens (at least). How do I detect when the Z80 is working? How do I get the Z80 working and get paused? I know this appears in the tech docs, but I already tried all possible combinations and for some reason the Z80 starts working even when it shouldn't :/ Gens crashes because the Z80 tries to write to its stack, which is at $0000 initially, so it wraps around and finishes writing to the ROM through the 68k bank area :/

 

The page stills exists, but the copier uses the parallel port (LPT) and the software apparently doesn't work under Windows (no, not even non-NT Windows...). Somebody should make another copier.

By the way, updated page yesterday, if you mind. Feel free to give feedback. Examples must be simple functions by the way, and very easy to understand (which doesn't mean make it crappily slow).