First of all, does anyone have a copy of Charles MacDonald's SMDUTIL? The link on his website is 404, and I can not find it anywhere (have done about two solid hours of Google scouring). I need it to dump my unit's BIOS, which reports onscreen to be v3.3 from 1992, and I have not seen any dumps of this version yet. I'd especially like to look inside it for an internal build date.
While searching for any information or tools, I came across five other BIOS dumps (although one isn't technically a "dump", more on this later):
* v3, 1991, available on the Sonic Retro wiki, internal date 8/17/91
* v3.1, 1991, available as part of "mdutils.zip" found here (see below), internal date 11/4/91
* v3.1g, 1992, available on the Sonic Retro wiki, no internal date
* v4.1a, 1993, available on the Sonic Retro wiki, "93-12-07" (ambiguous M/D ordering but based on v3 I will call it Dec 7, 1993)
* Magic Drive Plus BIOS, 1993, no internal date, no reference to either JSI or FFE, also includes anti-piracy message, available here
The 11/4/91 v3.1 version is quite interesting, as rather than being just a regular dump, it's a file of length $4200 (16896). In this file, it looks like the actual ROM begins at offset $1E00, and mirrors at $3E00 until the end of the file ($41FF). Within mdutils.zip, there is a "README!.MD" file which describes this file:
Code: Select all
MDOS31.PGM
==========
LOADS ON MEGADRIVE INSTEAD OF GAME
LATEST DOS 3.1, FULL VERSION.
ALLOWS YOU TO LOAD AND SAVE FILES TO RAM (IE. LOAD A FILE BUT *NOT RUN*, THEN
SAVE TO ANOTHER DISK)