[Nice Piano Music to lull you into a false sense of security] Digital ROMs, what would we do without them? Having the ability to grab a copy of Altered
Beast, along with a few other titles, and slide them onto your Everdrive is an essential
part of life today. Can you imagine how much more expensive retro
collecting would be without them? It doesn't bare thinking about. But where did all these ROMs come from? They seem to have been about for quite a while. I remember, even in the 90s, there were CDs
with Mega Drive and Super Nintendo ROMs, just ripe for the picking. Well, a good proportion of them actually came
out of this. This is the Super Magic Drive by Front Fareast
Industrial Corporation and released in 1991, and it allows you to transfer Mega Drive cartridges
to and from 3.5" Floppy..... and I bloody love floppy disks, so this is... well, it's
MAGIC, and it would definitely have seemed like that in the 90s. [Bumbley, humorous, yet nonchalant music] Front Fareast Industrial had been around since
the 1983, operating from New Taipei City; Popping up during "The Taiwan Miracle; an
economic boom when their information industry was growing significantly and supplying many
western tech companies directly.. It's owner, Mr Meng-Ming Liu was an ecclectic
fellow in the electronic world, with enough business acumen to follow the trends, without
worrying too much which side of the law they might be used for. One of their first projects was to exclusively
distribute one of the first Apple IIe clones; The Acer Microprofessor III, subsequently
becoming a game developer for the platform. Alongside this they focused on computer peripherals
and game console accessories through to the start of the 90s. This is when they used their knowledge to
create something which they knew too well might cause some fury among the big names
in the field. Building a system capable of *ahem*, backing
up your Mega Drive ROMs was one of these, and as a Western consumer, if you wanted to
get hold of one, back in the 90s, then you had to know some pretty specialised contacts. The contacts were likely the same contacts
responsible for the booming PC Engine import market in the West, which I heard about so
much, but sadly, had little hands on experience with. Another route would be through a specialist
such as National Console Support, who could be phoned or faxed, if you were aware of them...
in fact, they're still operating till this day, which is pretty astounding. Alternatively, you could connect up to a Bulletin
Board System, such as MAPHIA, which not only supplied Super Magic Drives but also formed
a repository for the ROMs themselves. This Bulletin Board was actually the centre
of a legal case with Sega, which I'll come back to, after we've looked at the Magic Drive
itself, and got an understanding of exactly how it works and what it can do. [Funky, hardhitting music, with an aftertaste of soothing jazz] So here we have the "Super Magic Drive", on
the back are two connectors, which fit a 25 pin parallel cable. One can connect to a special floppy drive,
which has bespoke wiring, the other is bi-directional parallel port that can connect directly to
your PCs parallel port; we'll get to that later. For now, I'll connect up the floppy drive,
which requires it's own power supply (incidentally a standard Mega Drive power adaptor works
fine here), plug the Magic Drive into the Mega Drive, switch it on, and away we go. Note the tiny hole cut out to allow the power
light to shine through. Like the original Master System converter,
this is made for the first version of the Mega Drive. Also, like the Master System converter, the
Magic Drive actually boots into the Mega Drive's Z80 Master System mode. As you can probably tell by this menu system,
which as you'd expect only makes use of the directional arrows and the B and C buttons
of the Mega Drive pad, just like a Master System. So what do we get. Well we've got the option to either Play Disk,
Play Cassette (by which they mean Cartridge) or Backup Test. Play Disk, as you'd imagine enables you to
load a ROM from a floppy disk. Now this was actually sent to me a couple
of years ago by a viewer called Andrew Neilson, who actually included this massive box of
"backed up games".... look at this absolute treasure trove. We could load up The PageMaster, Moonwalker,
Spiderman, Klax, Ranger X, Revenge of Shinobi, Prince of Persia or any of these other titles. There's too much to choose from, let's just
plump with Moonwalker and Spiderman. Now, despite what the label suggests, this disk has
three ROMs loaded onto it. You can choose between them. The drive will then whirr into action, and
Moonwalker is loaded into the memory of the Magic Drive. [Funky music fills the gap] *tea placing on table* It then plays, exactly the same as if you
had the cartridge inserted. There are no loading times, because the entire
ROM is loaded into the Magic Drive's RAM. In fact, even if you reset the Mega Drive,
it remains loaded, just like you're resetting the game as normal. If you want to load up something else, then
simply Power off the Mega Drive, and you're back to the main menu. Now, on this iteration, Magic Drive files
are actually broken into 512kb segments, so if you have a cartridge with a ROM of less
than 4Mbits, it can fit into a single file. Anything more, then it'll be broken in to
several files, if necessary spanning several disks. BUT you are restrained by the limits of the
Magic Drive memory. Early Magic Drives only had an 8Mbit memory,
which weren't upgradable. Later versions had 16Mbit which could be upgraded
to 24Mbit, and there's even rumour of a 32Mbit model. Thankfully I've got an upgraded version, with
the latest BIOS - 4.1A and 24Mbits of RAM, meaning it can load a game broken into 6 separate
segments. And yes, this includes the almighty Street
Fighter II: Champion Edition, which has a 3MB ROM, or if you multiply it by 8 to get
bits, a 24MBit ROM. As identified this time by the word CARD on
screen. NICE. Interestingly, my Magic Drive can format High
Density Disks to 1.6MB, rather than the traditional 1.44MB, allowing Street Fighter 2 to fit on
just 2 floppies. It feels weird how transposable the floppy
is with a cartridge game. In the 90s they felt miles apart. But this gives you an idea of how similiar
they were... of course, floppies lack the speed advantage of fast ROM chips. There we go! [SF2 Title theme] *badinggg* You can also use the "Backup Test" from the
main menu to load a cartridge straight into the Magic Drive's memory, and test a game
is compatible. Although this feature isn't on all devices;
I should note that different BIOSes have different features, and although mine is the latest,
the limited BIOS size of 8kb, means some features are actually missing from 4.1A, including
some VRAM commands and friendly messages (awwww). But all in all, I'd probably say this is the best BIOS version to have. [Plodding sounds of mild peril] So what else can this bad boy do? Well, if we flick over to the other menu,
we have the option to "backup" cartridges to floppy, and so get our lovely little ROM
files. Let's try one of the best games of all time,
Rise of the Robots. Another 24Mbit cartridge. .... and it really is, one of the best games ever... PSYC Interestingly, the button input is so sensitive
that it's hard to give a reasonable file name. I presume one of the capture components has
gone a little wonky after all this time. But anyway, the Magic Drive will take your
input name and then sequentially order each segment until the backup is complete, if it
runs out of room on a floppy, you can insert a new one and "retry" until the image is saved. Nice. That's Rise of the Robots for the Mega Drive
on 2 floppy disk. What more do you need in life? Apart from a kick in the teeth maybe? Now the Magic Drive actually outputs files
into the SMD format, although it saves them with numerical extensions rather than .SMD. This format is a little different from a standard
Binary dump; Essentially, at the top we get a 512 byte
header followed by 16k blocks of interlaved 68000 program data. Each block containing an 8K section of even
bytes, and an 8K section of odd bytes. It's quite easy to convert this into a pure
binary format. It's also quite easy to combine these files
into a single SMD file using an appropriate utility, so you can load it in your average emulator. Talking of utilities. Let's hook this up to a PC! [Rise of the Robots title theme] [Starry musical sounds of intrigue begin to whisk you away] First up, I'll need a suitable PC. The trusty Packard Bell will do fine. I'll need to connect the parallel cable up
to the Magic Drive's COM port, and then into the parallel port on the back of the PC. I'll also need to ensure that it's set to
IRQ 7 and is operating in bi-directional mode, which it is. We're then good to go. First, I'll try a Windows utility called RBDU
(or ROM Backup Device Utility), by Alpha II Productions. This can connect up to not only the Magic
Drive, but also the Super Magicom or Super WildCard. On my setup it could boot the inserted cartridge
at a button press, and gather some rudimentary information about the cartridge, but that's
about it. So instead, let's go to faithful DOS and smdutil,
or Super Magic Drive transfer utility by Charles MacDonald. This is better, here we have MANY COMMMAND
LINE OPTIONS, and importantly, we can save the cartridge ROM to a file, in one rapid
process. We can also feed a ROM into the Super Magic
Drive using an equally as simple command... Nice. It feels strange controlling the Mega Drive
from DOS, but quite compelling. [Taz sounds] If we take a peek at a disk formatted using
the Magic Drive here, we can see it can actually read the 1.6MB disk, and there's our Street
Fighter 2 files. If we want to load them back from here, we'd
need to combine them into one. But the beauty of using a PC is the ability
to save bigger cartridge ROMs than even 24mbits, if you want to. Although I was experiencing quite a few time out issues. Maybe it's something to do with the hardware I'm using. Interestingly, we can also inject Master System
ROMS in BIOS mode at a particular address. This proved less successful on my attempts,
however I'd heard rumours that the Magic Drive can actually play Master System games, with
mixed success. Presumably because it's already using the
Master System mode of the Mega Drive itself. To do this, we need to inject a Mega Drive
header into the Master System ROM, in my case, using a utility called TS-GGMD, which as you
can see by the size of the original file Sonic.SMS and modified file SonicMD.SMS, simply adds
the 512 byte header into the top of the file, and then we should be able to load it either
through the comm port, or the standard floppy route. I'm going to copy this across to floppy and
see what we get. So here we are. We can see the file, but on loading, it just
crashes the Magic Drive. The same thing happens with other Master System
ROMs, such as Alf. Ahhh, what a shame, it's such a great game....
*ahem* We can even try Game Gear ROMs using the same
process. Which, well, it kind of works with Double
Dragon, albeit with some serious glitching and colour issues. But apparently, other people have had more
success, perhaps with previous firmware versions. I'm not going to keep playing around here,
I think it's time to move on. What else can we, or can't we do? Well, naturally games with built in specialised
chips, can't run through a copy. In fact, take Virtua Racing, the Magic Drive
doesn't even recognise it as a game cartridge. We can however run games from other regions,
as it also acts as a multi-region pass through. Here's an NTSC version of Super Monaco Grand
Prix, which now works beautifully. If I ran this on a standard PAL Mega Drive,
the game would be in black and white.... and here's a Japanese version of something else,
which not only fits, but plays. Lovely stuff. It means that it doesn't really matter where
your ROM images hail from. We can also run games with save states. The Super Magic Drive has a built in battery,
specifically to hold this information, which you can then write to disk, and re-load, before
loading up the actual game, preserving all If we look inside, we can see the battery... OH JESUS CHRIST. These bloody things are the bane of a Retro
collector's life. If you have a Super Magic Drive, please make
sure you get rid of the leaky battery before it eats away the traces. [Funky, uplifting, jazzy music, with a good bassline to get you in the mood for fixing] OK, with that fixed, we can see the BIOS there. We've got a Motorola floppy controller over
there, a logic chip here, SRAM here and this board contains the DRAM. These boards have a couple of different revisions
at least. Anyway let's get it back together and.... ....test a few more things; *knocking on table* [Bumpy, clown type music, with a vibe of 1960s musical oboe] Does it work with the Master System converter? Well, the original version doesn't fit, and
even if we had the 2nd version, as we've already discussed, the Magic Drive has a few issues
running Master System games. Although yours, might work better. Does it work with Sonic and Knuckles? Wellll, no, it doesn't even see the cartridge. Does it work with an Action Replay cartridge. Nope. It just hangs, although I've heard that it
is possible to use the Magic Drive with so called Gold Finger codes. Does it work in that Chinese HD Mega Drive
clone? No, because the cartridge slot is housed too
low in the case for it to reach. Does it work with an Analogue Mega SG? I'm pretty certain it will, but I haven't
unboxed mine yet, so we'll do that when I get round to reviewing it. Does it work with a Mega Drive or Genesis
II. Well, no, the shape prevents it from fitting
properly. Does it work with a Genesis 3? No, because that particular version doesn't
have Sega Master System mode. Does it work with an Everdrive cartridge? No, it doesn't work with an Everdrive cartridge. Does it work with a Sega 32X... Come on, you know it doesn't, let's just move
on. [Ominous music for the soul, with a tinge of unease] So what about this legal malarkey? Well, it was back in 1993 that a case was
brought by Sega Enterprises Ltd against Maphia, a Bulletin Board System operated by Chad Sherman
out of San Francisco, California. Chad was the average BBS type character going
under the user name "Brujjo Digital". But he also ran a business called Parsec Trading,
which as well as owning a network of linked Bulletin Boards, sold Super Magic Drives. Chad used Maphia to sell Super Magic Drives
to those seeking this elusive treasure, BUT, Maphia was also used to host various Sega
Genesis ROMs, which some of the 400 or so users had uploaded after making a copy from
their Super Magic Drives. After an anonymous tip, Sega sought to establish
direct infringement under section 106 of the Copyright act. This was made easier because, some of the
ROMs held on Maphia - although, not all - held US copyright registration. In fact, at the time of the case, the Bulletin
Board contained 28 Sega games, six of those were beta pre-releases and only 2 had registered
copyrights; these were Jurassic Park and Sonic Spinball. Sega had discovered this by having an employee
gain access to the BBS under a pseudonym, with the assistance of the informant. In December 1993, Sherman's computers were
seized and the Sega games were extrapolated. Information obtained from the BBS confirmed
that Sherman knew that copies of the games were being uploaded and shared on the BBS,
and indeed had even facilitated the process. The fact that Sherman was selling Super Magic
Drives which went hand in hand with this behaviour demonstrated a commercial aspect, combined
with the 10 megabytes of free downloads available. Sega would obtain an injunction against Sherman
under copyright, trademark and state trade name law preventing the return of Sherman's
computer equipment in order to minimise the threat of continued violations. Although Sherman wasn't liable for direct
infringement, as it couldn't be proved he directly caused the copying, he was for Contributory
infringement, with the Maphia BBS directly infringing Sega's copyright. Sherman's Fair Use defence was about as watertight
as a Youtuber uploading a full movie and declaring it for "Fair Use". Sherman's claims that the Super Magic Drives
were supplied for backup purposes, was also dismissed, given that no one would pay $350
to backup cartridges which are notoriously reliable in the first place. And so, following the case of Nintendo of
America v. Dragon Pacific International (where damages were awarded to Nintendo following
Dragon's distribution of NES compilation game cartridges, containing Nintendo's games),
$5,000 of damages was awarded to Sega for each copyright infringement, thus totalling
$10,000, on top of legal fees. The damages could have amounted to treble
is Sega could provide evidence of damage to profits, however, naturally they could not
proove this negligible impact. Ultimately, this case, not only helped stem
the tide of ROM distribution at the time, it also had implications for other BBS's and
even around ISP liability for infringements that occur through their networks. Ultimately, as we know, it certainly didn't
stop piracy however, with it remaining most rife among the naturally disk based computers
of the time. As the 16 bit platforms died off, it was up
to other wizards to come up with ways of breaking the piracy measures of consoles such as the
Saturn, Playstation and even N64 and then finding ways to distribute them. Riveting as they are, they are stories for
another time. Of course, the Super Magic Drive wasn't the
only copying device for the Mega Drive, with others including the chunky and alluring Mega
Disk Interceptor, which looks like a transformer. You could also get variants of the Magic Drive
for the Super Nintendo and even PC Engine, if that's your thing. Although I certainly wouldn't want Nintendo
lurking behind me as I make "BACKUPS" of their games. Anyway, thanks for watching, have a great
evening. If you have any knowledge of the manufacture or sale of counterfeit film and video products or related software... Please call our UK hotline (DON'T) on 020 8568 6646 or in the Republic of Ireland, 01882 8565 Your support can end the distribution of poor quality product. -DON'T LET THE PIRATES BURN A HOLE IN YOUR POCKET- *BOOM*
I love videos about the 90s video game piracy subculture. I just wish I could find more of them, it seems to be a pretty elusive scene for obvious reasons
I knew a girl in elementary school who had something like this for SNES, along with hundreds of games on pink floppy disks.
I went to her house once for a school assignment, and imagine my surprise when I find everything from Mortal Kombat 2 to Sailor Moon games. Blew my fucking mind as an 8 year old kid who bought maybe one game a year. She didn't even seem to care that she had them all that much, so I imagine her dad was really into them or something.