Your sounds on the SP-202's pads. Every pad back out.
A custom firmware for the BOSS Dr. Sample SP-202, on the same SmartMare card. In the SP-202, it emulates a SmartMedia 4MB 5V card. On your computer, it adds the SP-202 Card Manager: put your WAV files on the pads, set them, and save any pad as a WAV.
€89 delivered in Europe · $99 delivered in the USA, import duty paid · with the SP-202 firmware installed
Prepare your sounds on the computer, play them on the SP-202.
Drop a WAV on a pad. It is turned into the SP-202's own format, in HI-FI, STANDARD or LO-FI, mono or stereo.
Play any pad in the browser and save it as a WAV, including what you sampled on the SP-202.
Trim start and end, gate or trigger, loop or one shot, filters and ring mod.
Save all your pads as a sample set on the card, in 9MB of extra memory, and load another in seconds.
Banks A and B travel through the SP-202's BACKUP: copy a single sound into its memory.
The SP-202 Card Manager is a page stored on the card. It opens in Chrome or Edge (Firefox 151+ too), and installs firmware updates.
Installed on every SmartMare 5V. SmartMare 5V is made and sold for the SP-202, and tested with it. Firmware updates are free, from your browser.
SP-202 off, connect the card to your computer with a USB-C cable. A drive named SMARTMARE opens.
Open the SP-202 Card Manager, read the card, drop your WAV files on pads, trim and set them, write the card.
Card in the SP-202, switch it on, and play your sounds from the card.
Try the SP-202 Card Manager now, on a demo card with three sounds. No card needed.
Open the demoFor the curious: what is inside the card, and how the SP-202 stores its sounds.
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 the SP-202's speed. A 16MB QSPI flash holds everything the card stores.
The SP-202 sees a SmartMedia 4MB 5V card, ID 98h 6Bh. Your computer sees, over USB-C, a drive with the SP-202 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 the SP-202 Card Manager. The only part a firmware update replaces. |
| SmartMedia data | 4MB | What the SP-202 writes: your pads, its pad table, the BACKUP of banks A and B. |
| Check bytes | 2MB | The 16 spare bytes of every page (ECC and block address), kept as an original card keeps them. |
| Sample sets | 9MB | Whole kits saved from the SP-202 Card Manager, shown as files on the drive. The SP-202 never sees them. |
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.
| Blocks | On an SP-202 card |
|---|---|
| 0 | Card information (CIS), as on any formatted SmartMedia card |
| 1 | A “Roland … BOSS SP-202” header, then the pad table: start, length, quality, mode and effect of each pad on the card (banks C and D) |
| 2–447 | The sounds on the card, one after another: 3,653,632 bytes |
| 448–511 | BACKUP: a copy of banks A and B, the SP-202's own 512KB memory |
The SP-202 stores sound in a 4-bit format of its own, never published. We worked it out by writing test patterns to a card and recording what the SP-202 played back. Samples come in frames of 4 bytes (8 samples), frames in pairs; the top bits of a pair choose one of five layouts and a step from 0.25 to 512, and the samples come from an interpolation tree. Stereo pads alternate pairs: left, right.
Checked against the SP-202 itself: its own recordings, decoded by the SP-202 Card Manager, match what it plays (R² 0.991), and sounds encoded by the SP-202 Card Manager play back exactly as predicted.
| Quality | Sample rate | Time on the card, mono |
|---|---|---|
| HI-FI | 31.25 kHz | 3 min 53 s |
| STANDARD | 15.63 kHz | 7 min 47 s |
| LO-FI 1 | 7.81 kHz | 15 min 35 s |
| LO-FI 2 | 3.91 kHz | 31 min 10 s |