Dumping Mega Drive / Genesis cartridges through controller port 2, with a Mega-CD providing the boot environment. Incredible, right? I’ve been looking into the Sega CD Transfer Suite from Mask of Destiny at RetroDev, which makes it possible to read cartridge data without removing any of the ROM chips.

I’ve dragged out my old Athlon 500 PC for this experiment, mainly because it has something rather important on the back. A parallel port! The idea is to connect that to controller port 2 on the Mega Drive and use the transfer software to read a cartridge directly into the computer.

Today’s candidate is a PAL copy of Fatal Fury 2. Before we can get anywhere near dumping it, however, there’s a cable to make. I started mapping the coloured wires with the continuity function on my multimeter, which worked reasonably well until I discovered that the probes were a little too large for the connections. I also managed to break one of the wires while stripping it, despite having perfectly good wire strippers nearby. Wonderful!

The Sega/Mega-CD runs the transfer software, while the PC receives the data over its parallel connection. There’s also a little trick involving cartridge pin B32, which needs to be covered so the machine boots the Mega-CD software rather than the cartridge itself.

After a considerable amount of fiddling, I’d wired everything together and was ready to try a transfer. Unfortunately, the PC wasn’t receiving anything useful. Eventually I discovered that I’d misunderstood the numbering on the parallel connector and wired the second row incorrectly. Ah. That might explain a few things!

Once I’d corrected the wiring, I was able to get further with the software. I even tried the communication test before returning to the cartridge dump. At one point I accidentally selected Fatal Fury 2 when I’d intended to try the Mega-CD BIOS, which rather neatly demonstrates how organised this whole operation was.

The transfer actually started, and the progress counter began climbing. That was a lovely sight after all the fiddling with the cable! Unfortunately, it eventually stopped around 68% and returned to the menu rather than completing the dump. So close, yet so far.

So we’re not quite there yet. At least the basic hardware and software are running, and I’ve got a better idea of where things might be going wrong. Thanks to Mask of Destiny for making this rather interesting experiment possible!

I’ll keep investigating the cable and communications setup before trying again. Ideally I’d also like to make a proper cartridge-reading arrangement one day, rather than having quite so many wires hanging out of everything.

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