In this last brief article, I’d like to address what made me start studying Z80 assembly and take interest in how to modify the Master System BIOS.
As many of you probably know, I’m the founder and maintainer of the 16-bit Audiophile Project and while we’ve always been focused on Mega Drive, our mission has always been broader.
MDFourier, an audio analysis tool for consoles and audio equipment of all kind made by Artemio, has been ported to the Master System for a while thanks to the efforts of Pinobatch, but right now we don’t have many data gathered.
One of the issues behind this is that not everyone has a SMS flashcart and probably are not interested in investing into one, so I wanted to find a way around this and when I discovered that it was possible to load custom software in the Master System BIOS I found in it an opportunity to help spreading the use of MDFourier.
For those who were unaware, I’ve been contributing for a long time to MDFourier and MDFourier has been key to 16bap to solve many issues we had (VGM accuracy, audio timing, differences between Mega Drive revisions, etc.), so I wanted to see more MDFourier analysis done on the SMS.
Now we have finally a custom Master System BIOS loaded with MDFourier in it, so people won’t be forced to buy a flashcart anymore and hopefully we’ll start seeing an influx of new data.
Not only that, but having custom software in the Master System BIOS means that you can now load diagnostic ROMs in it to test a broken system, even one without a working cartridge connector!
That’s pretty huge IMHO and I hope people will take advantage of it to troubleshoot and save broken Master Systems from the scrapyard.
Finally, before leaving you with the download links to the MDFourier BIOS, I’d like to thank various people who helped me out during this small (but intense) journey.
Maxim of SMSPower – for all the work he’s done in documenting how the Master System works
Bock and Segmtfault from SMSPower – for the excellent disassembly of the US/EU v1.3 Master System BIOS which was incredibly well commented
Artemio and Pinobatch – for making MDFourier and its port to SMS and helping me a bit when I struggled understanding some Z80 assembly concepts.
PlgDavid and Leo Oliveira – absolute kings who helped me a lot through this journey to “learn” (big air quotes) Z80 assembly: without them I would have never been able to pull this off
Anyway, here are the download links for the Master System BIOS with MDFourier, in both EU/US version and “World” (ie: region free) version (I highly recommend this one).
Thanks for reading!