A free firmware, for your own experiments.
With the generic firmware, SmartMare emulates a plain SmartMedia 4MB 5V card. On your computer, its Generic Card Manager keeps an exact backup of the whole card and puts it back when you need it. SmartMare 5V is sold for the BOSS SP-202 and ships with its firmware; this one is a free download, not tested outside the SP-202: in other gear, use it at your own risk.
Free · open source (GNU GPL v3) · not tested outside the BOSS SP-202
In your gear, the card. On your computer, Generic Card Manager.
Your gear formats the card, saves to it and loads from it, as with an original 4MB card.
Save the card as one image file on your computer: every page, exactly as your gear wrote it.
Open an image and write it to the card. Only the blocks that differ are written, and each is read back.
Keep an image per project or per machine on your computer and swap them in a minute.
A factory-blank card in seconds, ready for your gear to format.
Generic Card Manager is a page stored on the card. It opens in Chrome or Edge (Firefox 151+ too), and installs firmware updates.
Not tested outside the BOSS SP-202: in other 5V gear, it is an experiment, at your own risk. Tell us how it goes in the forum. The card's size · The gear
Take the card out of your gear and connect it with a USB-C cable. A drive named SMARTMARE opens.
Open Generic Card Manager, read the card, and save it: the whole card in one .img file.
Slide the card back into your gear. To restore it later, open the backup and write it to the card.
Try Generic Card Manager now, on a demo card image. No card needed.
Open the demoFor the curious: what is inside the card.
No original SmartMedia chip inside. A Raspberry Pi RP2350A microcontroller plays the part of the card: two Arm Cortex-M33 cores at 150 MHz, whose PIO state machines answer the SmartMedia bus in hardware, at your gear's speed. A 16MB QSPI flash holds everything the card stores.
Your gear sees a SmartMedia 4MB 5V card, ID 98h 6Bh. Your computer sees, over USB-C, a drive with Generic Card Manager, a serial port for it, and the update interface. No driver to install.
| Zone | Size | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Firmware | 1MB | The card's program and Generic Card Manager. The only part a firmware update replaces. |
| SmartMedia data | 4MB | The 512 data bytes of every page your gear writes. |
| Check bytes | 2MB | The 16 spare bytes of every page (ECC and block address), kept as an original card keeps them. |
| Free | 9MB | Not used by the generic firmware today. |
A SmartMedia card is read in pages of 528 bytes: 512 of data and 16 spare bytes with two ECC codes and the block's address. 16 pages make a block of 8KB, the smallest part that can be erased, and 512 blocks make the 4MB card. A formatted card carries its card information (CIS) in its first good block.
A backup is the whole card, 8,192 pages of 528 bytes, spare bytes included: written back, the card is exactly as your gear left it, whatever its own format. Generic Card Manager checks each page against the SmartMedia ECC and tells you if the card information is there.
A free download for SmartMare 5V. The card itself is sold for the BOSS SP-202, with the SP-202 firmware installed.