Last weekend I picked up a lot of games (SNES and SMS) off my friend (traded for them, cost me nothing), and one of the items I got was a Super Wildcard DX.

Quick story on this little guy: I traded it to my buddy a few years back for a guitar pedal and a Sega Genesis model 1 + Sega CD model 2 w/ the end so the model 1 genny would fix/look properly.

Anyway, for those that don't know what the Super Wildcard is, it's a SNES ROM dumper. It's pretty useless for that these days, since you can find every rom online, but what some of the other features it has are quite useful, even for today.

First, this device takes floppy disks, so rom's would span across multiple disks if they are bigger than 1.44 MB in size (most of the games I like will span across 2 to 4 disks).

Second, this little thingy here will load roms off of floppies. Pretty sweet since now I can play Final Fantasy 5, Terranigma, Tales of Phantasia, etc., without the use of an emulator or a reproduction. It's a little time consuming, but it is what is.

Third, and one of the coolest things ever - you can dump SRAM from one cart and either 1.) use it with your roms, or 2.) load it into another cartridge. I'm unsure if you can take a save from an emulator and load it up (will be testing that out shortly), or dump the SRAM into a file to use in an emulator (again, will be testing that out as well).

The sram transfer from cart to cart is quick - as fast as turning on the SNES, turning it off, inserting the new cart, and turning it on. I'll try to get some pictures of it later, maybe a video if people want one.

The only problem(s) I have with it is 1.) I couldn't get it to work in my SNES Jr. (mini snes, model 2 snes, whatever you want to call it), and 2.) it doesn't balance right in the SNES, so I need to prop the back up with something (at the moment, it's some card protectors).

Figured I'd share this with everyone since I'm sure not everyone has seen/heard of this thing, and maybe there are some owners out there that don't really know how to use it.

Edit: It's not a DX2, it's just a DX

Yea, I got one of those back in 1994. One thing I used it for was taking the save files and then use a hex editor on them, also I kept backups of the save files encase the battery died. As far as I know the save files will work with an emulator. If not I'm sure there is an easy way to convert it so it does work with it.

All you need to do to convert an emulators sram is use ucon64 to convert it, takes all of 4 seconds

Just for grins, I downloaded a save state for Final Fantasy 5j, loaded the game in the Super Wildcard, and tested it out. Pretty good stuff.

Nice trade man!
I know I had a lot of good times with my SWC DX

Also, small correction, you can fit 1.6Mb on a floppy that was formatted to the fullest. Formatting on the SWC also speeds uploading times.
This was perfect for fitting 12 megabit games or combinations (1x 8Mb + 1x 4Mb, or 3x 4Mb games) on a single diskette.

It was fun creating and saving save states also. KeepIng in mind this was years before the first SNES emulator hit!

One last thing, if you haven't done this already. Open it up and check your SRAM battery. They have a nasty tendency of leaking acid onto the motherboard. It's a good idea to either replace it with a cell battery, snip it, or something simple like I have done and surrounds it in hot glue and turn it on a few times a year to keep it charged.

I'll have to try that out with the floppies and give that a shot.

How do you create save states? Is there an in game menu? I'm also wondering if there is a memory upgrade so I can upgrade it to 128 MB instead of 32, so I can play Tales of Phantasia and the decompressed Star Ocean.

What kind of battery should be used? A CR2032 cell battery?

I may be thinking of another of these SNES devices, but I read that the disc drives can be removed and if you could find a replacement that will detect you could go with a memory card reader. I just can't remember if it was this style one or those using iomega zip drives. It might be something to look into. My friend had a chinese crap knockoff of what you had, and I think it only held like 4 or 8Mbit games as I remember having to load a few discs to fire up most games.

It loads up to 32mbit games off of floppies, so that wouldnt solve the issue for games that are 48mbit or anything larger than 32. The only way around it is modding it with ram chips to increase the size of its internal memory, which i havent been able to find any resources online for this type of mod. I did think about swapping the fdd drive for a zip or a media card reader of the same interface, though unsure if it work would.

Oops.. Sorry, I forgot about this thread.

What game do you want to play that is actually over 32Mb? I only know of one, Star Ocean (SFC), and it uses a specialized compression math co-processor so it wouldn't work even if you could get it to fit.

The only way you could get the DX to read over 32Mb would be to do some deep BIOS modifying, but no one has ever been able to do this and the only guys that were capable, Fairlight, developed the DX2 instead, so that will be as good as it gets I suppose.

With the DX2 you can load games from a CDRom, hdd, Zip, or Sdcard with adapter and BIOS update.

I'd love having that DX2 if it had a modern card reader. Still they don't do chipped games though.

For anyone who doesn't have a nostalgic tie to the old copiers I would just suggest either Krikzz's Super EverDrive or
RetroZone's flashcart, I have a lot of great memories tied to my SMC and SWC otherwise I wouldn't even keep them.

You can do DSP1 and DSP2 roms on the Super Wildcard DX as long as you have a DSP 2 cart in the slot.
I used to use this quite a lot to save tons of Super Mario Kart ghost saves to a floppy.

I ended up just buying the loose carts for the DSP/FX/CPS co-cpu games I cared about.

My friend had a reboxed version of it from China I used to use a lot in the day, but like I said, my fascination ends with the floppy drive.

A correction to your correction - the SWC can read floppies formatted to 1.72MB. IIRC I used a PC program called FDFORMAT.EXE to format floppies to 1.72MB. Both PC and SWC could read them. Worked on my SWC 2.8CC, DX and DX2.

You can also do a memory upgrade so it can support games up to 48 mbits, but the cost of it isn't worth it.

I believe Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean, and a small handful of other games won't run on it. I've have Mario Kart running on it, and Mario RPG.

Super Mario RPG is an SA-1 chip game.. you have this running on a Super Wild Card DX?