The SEGA SF-7000 Super Control Station

SEGA SF-7000 Super Control Station

The SEGA SF-7000 Super Control Station was made to expand SC-3000 computer capabilities. Its design with neat lines and compact shape makes this unit incredibly simple, but so elegant and beautiful.

It connects to SC-3000 by a special cable with a cartridge. It’s not known why this cable is so short that you must put the computer above Sf-7000, but this choice by SEGA made the overall look so different and elegant compared to its competitors in the eighties market.

Even the hardware was really competitive for that era and gave SC-3000 almost all devices that a professional computer needed: a 3” Compact Floppy Disk, RS-232C Serial port and Centronics Parallel Port.

Considering that Serial and Parallel ports are still present in many actual PC, this expansion unit lets you still interface SC-3000 to a PC. Unfortunately, the 3” Compact Floppy Disk hadn’t a long life as the 3,5 had instead, but there are people around the world that could plug a 3,5 Floppy Disk Drive to SC-3000, and in the future, we will give you more information about that and how to do it! An overall very good and great unit for your SC-3000!

Technical features of the SEGA SF-7000

The architecture of the SEGA SF-7000 was really advanced. It has been designed around a PPI chip to expand the main unit with extra IO. So it has a floppy disk driver, a serial port driver, a parallel port driver and 64Kb of RAM.

NAME	SF-7000
BRAND	Sega
TYPE	Expansion unit
ORIGIN COUNTRY	Japan
YEAR	1984
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE	Sega Disk Basic on Floppy Disk (included)
RAM	64Kb
I/O PORTS	RS-232C Serial Port, Centronics Parallel Port, second floppy disk
Floppy Disk Drive	3" Compact Floppy Disk Drive
Power Supply	220V,240VAC 50Hz or 110V,120VAC 60Hz
Dimension	(W)35.0cm x (D)35.0cm x (H)5.5cm

The technology of the SEGA SF-7000.

The SEGA SF-7000 Super Control Station was designed to expand SEGA SC-3000 computer mainly with a Floppy Disk drives which can read Compact Floppy Disk of 3".

CF2, 3 inches Floppy Disk Drive This kind of Floppy Disk Drive was supposed to substitute the old 5,25" floppy disk drives more popular in the eighties.

Several 8bit systems, such as Amstrad and Sinclair, could have their 3" Floppy Disk Drive, but soon it was replaced by the 3.5", which still exists nowadays.

CF2, 3 inches Floppy Disk This 3" disk inherited the features of a 5.25" one: the index hole and the possibility to read/write on both sides, but it gave more space for data.

SEGA SF-7000 RS-232C Serial Port SF-7000 has an RS-232C built-in standard serial interface, which let you plug your SEGA to a modem, different devices and also other computers that use this interface. You can reach the speed from 300 to 9600 baud, which for that era was a great speed.

By default, the speed of the serial port of the SF-7000 Super Control Station is set to 300 baud on PCB with a jumper, but it's easy to change it.

It is possible also to connect SF-7000 to any computer with a serial port (as for example a PC) and exchange data from/to each other.

SEGA SF-7000 Centronics parallel port SEGA decided also to include a Centronics standard parallel port, still used in many computers nowadays, including PC. This port was fundamental to use many 80 column printers which were never released by SEGA.

Unfortunately in those years was more popular the 7+7 pin plug instead of the 18+18 pin, more popular nowadays on parallel port printers.

SF-7000 has 64KBytes built in memory bank, which is filled with data read from the floppy disk. When you use the SEGA Disk Basic, usually 18K are free for BASIC programming, but it is possible to load cartridges dump data stored on disks.

This was a great feature for a computer because it was possible to create a special version of cartridges to use with new peripherals like RS-232C or the Centronics Printer.

This is one of the most appreciated peripheral for the SC-3000 Survivors.

Drawings of the SEGA SF-7000 Super Control Station.

This is the top view of the SF-7000. Straight lines, clean look. The simple look together with its dark color makes this unit elegant.

These are the back and front views of the SEGA SF-7000. Thin profile, clean and neat shiny front panel.

This is the side view of the SEGA SF-7000. Thin profile, neat angle and low profile.

Measurements of the Unit are mainly: (W)35.0cm x (D)35.0cm x (H)5.5cm

Galleries of the SEGA SF-7000 Super Control Station selected by Survivors

The SEGA SF-7000 comes in a big box. Inside you can find the unit, foam packages, user Manual, an interface cable and a couple of ferrite rings for EMI. Here there are several photo galleries.

SEGA SF-7000 Packaging.