Genesis MD-Pro Flash Card and Cartridge Dumping Stuff:
Tried dumping some games I had through the MD-PRO
interface using uCON64...no go...all I get is a file full of 0xFF's.
Don't know whats wrong. Will build my OWN dumper (based on Cyan's
design) soon. Decided to dump a DreamWriter-written cartridge using
uCON64. It worked but all the bytes are inverted! So instead of seeing
"SEGA" I see "ESAG" so each pair of bytes had to be inverted again
(little/big endian thing?). I went and opened up TOTOTEK's own
multigame ROM (MDPACKU4.BIN) and in fact each pair of bytes WAS
flipped. I thought about (and actually started out) coding a little C
prog to flip the bytes around in the whole file and output a new file
but decided to check out my trusty old Hex Workshop Hex editor, and
what do you know I found what I needed. Hex Workshop is powerfull and
very very useful. In order to make my life easier, in the tools section
there is an option to do a Byte Flip. I decided to try it; first I did
a 32bit Byte Flip but that didn't help much...everything was even more
weird. Then I went for a 16-bit Byte Flip and BINGO! We have what we
needed, and no need to code anything (although that would have been
good practice.) So after the 90 minute or so Byte Flippin' operation
(damn that was slow). I decided to try out this little rom I dumped to
see if it can be run inside of an emulator. I plugged it into GENS
and...nothing. It seems MD-PRO has it's OWN binary format (well, it is
basically an FPGA chip...) so I guess that kinda makes sense...but why
was uCON64 able to rip SOME KIND of readable data? Hmm, oh well.
So what's the point of all this? It's that the
MD-Pro interface CANNOT be used to dump ROM's from cartridges..boooo!
Thus a custom dumper is a must.