Sega Master System & Game Gear

The Master System was a very popular console amongst video games players in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s, and was the rival of the less powerful but more popular NES. This 8 bit forerunner of the Megadrive had limited capabilities compared with its 16 bit descendent, but the playability and ingenuity of the games led to many superb titles, including a reknowed conversion of the platform hit, Sonic the Hedgehog, which is still a joy to play today. In the early 90s the hand-held version of the Master System, the Game Gear was released to counter the Nintendo gameboy, and more games were developed for the portable sega. The Master System and Game Gear had nearly identical hardware (the Game Gear just used a slightly different palette) and thus most emulators of one system also support the other.

Miracle

Miracle, by Richard Talbot-Watkins and Matthew Godbolt, is written in 100% ARM code, and is highly optimised, so it is unlikely we'll see the SMS emulated any faster. The compatibility is very good, and at present there are only a few games which don't work, Alex Kidd, Altered Beast, Sega Chess, Speedball2, Time Soldiers, Xenon2, The Simpsons and Zool. The sound emulation is almost perfect as well, and even sampled speech is easily recognisable. Miracle doesn't emulate Game Gear games properly, and although they can be made to run (by settyping as SMS games), the palette is incorrect which can make many games unplayable.

A WIMP frontend is provided to allow the user to configure the key controls (for joypads 1 and 2) and alter the frame skip setting to optimise performance for your system. Miracle can automatically set the frameskip and although it normally does a good job of guessing a decent value, you can also override this manually. Games are loaded by simply double-clicking an SMS ROM image and the game then starts automatically. You can easily return to the desktop at any time by pressing escape, and then resume playing again by clicking on the icon bar icon.

This is a very professional emulator, and a joy to use, even on low-end machines. Take it from someone who owns a Master System and Game Gear, this emulator is as good as it gets!

Coming soon: The authors are intending to add full multi-tasking emulation in a window, 9 channel FM sound (even better sound emulation). Battery backed save game support is also on the way eventually. A later v0.11 has been developed, but unfortunately, the frontend is unstable on the RISC PC and so has not been released.

Miracle v0.10 (5/5/98)
Speed Rating: ARM 3 ARM 6 ARM 7 StrongARM
NB: With a small frameskip, Miracle is full speed on even ARM 3 systems.

Miracle Homepage

Sega

About 18 months before Miracle was first released, Gareth Moore did an Acorn port of v1.0 of Marat Fayzullin's MasterGear emulator, naming it Sega (since !MasterGear was too long for RISC OS). MasterGear had already been ported to quite a few different platforms and being written entirely in C, was fairly easy to get working, with the source code being freely distributable. Since it is not optimised towards the Acorn, Sega is nowhere near as fast as Miracle, but was one of the first console emulators on the Acorn (after Gameboy) and has served us well.

Sega's compatibility is very good, with only 11 games known not to work on it, however the sound emulation leaves a lot to be desired and the poor quality sound does let this emulator down. Sega would have vanished without trace after the release of Miracle if it had not been for a few redeeming features. The SRAM (battery backed RAM) which is not supported in Miracle works fine in Sega, allowing large games such as Y's and Phantasy Star to be played properly, and saved when the emulator is closed down, just like on a real Master System. As well as Master System games, Sega can also run Game Gear games, and remains the only way to play Game Gear games on your Acorn. I have even heard reports that on StrongARMs, Sega has been known to run faster than Miracle, which would seem unlikely but is probably due to a bug in Miracle.

Gareth is to be congratulated for his efforts, providing the only Master System emulator on the Acorn for well over a year.

Sega v0.71 (3/8/97)
Speed Rating: ARM 3 ARM 6 ARM 7 StrongARM

The Acorn MasterGear Download page
Marat Fayzullin's Generic MasterGear page

MGear

In August 1998, Marat Fayzullin released v1.1 of his MasterGear emulator, it featured several bug fixes, but more importantly improved compatibility. Since Gareth Moore has moved to other things since doing his port of v1.00, our prolific porter David McEwen took it upon himself to port the latest version to the Acorn, naming it MGear.

The port and the original have progressed since then. With MasterGear reaching version 1.2. The most interesting innovation is that it contains emulation for Japanese SG1000/SC3000 systems, which were predecessors to the Master System

The port includes primitive sound, which although better than !Sega is still not as good as Miracle. If sound is important and you want to listen to that Sonic tune again you can log it into a MIDI file, a feature that may result in direct MIDI output. Another new feature in the port is the ability to load and save SRAM. It also boasts extra speed, but Miracle still and will always outperform it in this area.

MGear 1.33 (09/01/99)
Speed Rating: ARM 3 ARM 6 ARM 7 StrongARM

David McEwen's Acorn page
Marat Fayzullin's Generic MasterGear page

Technical Information
CPU - Zilog Z80A running at 4 Mhz
Display- 256x192 pixels, 256 sprites at once, 32 from a palette of 64 colours
Sound - 3 channels + white noise generator
RAM - 8Kb
VRAM - 16Kb
ROM - upto 512Kb
reference - S: the sega magazine, 1st edition (10/89), later known as Sega Power.

ROMs:
Sega Emulation World (DOWN)
Yip's Game Gear page - loads of GG ROMs
Masterland
Dave's Arcade Classics, SMS ROMs
Emulation Camp - lots of SMS ROMS (though temporarily down), and emulators.
Lots of SMS ROMs
Lots of GG ROMs

Recommended ROMs:
Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic Chaos, R-Type, Ecco, Golden Axe, Mickey Mouse - Castle of Illusion, Mortal Kombat 1 & 2, Phantasy Star, Psycho Fox, Rampage, Sensible Soccer, Wonderboy, Wonderboy in Monsterland (WB2), Wonderboy 3, Desert Strike, F1, Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands, The New Zealand Story, Golden Axe Warrior, Wimbledon, Olympic Gold, Winter Olympics, Fantasy Zone, Afterburner, Xenon 2, Y's.
The Phantasy Star Webring