MD-ROM

Generated by scripts/gen-format-pages.py from docs/data/format-metadata/, FILE_FORMATS.csv and docs/formats-master.csv. Do not edit by hand: change the source, then run the script.

Mega Drive ROM Preview.

At a glance

How much Poka reads

B4 Summary. The container and metadata are read and summarised (counts, properties, structure), but the main content is not rendered.

Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-md/src/main.rs (288 lines) and plugin.json. No unit tests or tests/samples.rs, and the corpus has no .md-rom, .smd-rom and .bin-rom sample. Covers .md-rom, .smd-rom and .bin-rom. The card decodes the header at 0x100–0x1FF after checking the SEGA prefix: system, copyright, domestic and overseas names, serial, region, I/O devices, ROM and RAM ranges, backup SRAM, modem information, notes, and the checksum compared with the sum over the ROM after the header. A second crate, poka-genesis-rom, reads the same header for .gen and .smd. Judgement: B4 rather than B5, because the whole header is decoded and checked; nothing of the ROM content (code, graphics, sound) is.

What Poka does not read

• ROM content is not decoded: no code, graphics or sound
• Interleaved SMD dumps are detected but not de-interleaved, so they fail the SEGA check (the code says so)
• Domestic names in Shift-JIS are decoded as UTF-8 with replacement characters
• Files over 256 MiB are cut (flagged)

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

• rom_analyzer (candidate; MIT; Rust; https://docs.rs/rom-analyzer) — Reads console ROM headers (Genesis/Mega Drive among them); Mega Drive field coverage not confirmed from the docs page.
• MioROM (candidate; MIT; Python; https://pypi.org/project/miorom/) — ROM hacking framework; its platform matrix lists Mega Drive .md/.bin/.smd with parsers (read/write scope not stated).

Sources

• parsers/poka-md/src/main.rs
• parsers/poka-md/plugin.json