MSX

The MSX  was a nice little Z80-based computer, used mainly during the early 80s in South America, Asia and the former Soviet Union, but never really took off in the US or UK. It was a very tidy little computer, which was ideal for educational purposes, and as such was used in many Russian schools.

There is a port of Marat Fayzullin's fMSX emulator, by David Mcewen. The size of the emulator, is due to the fact that it comes with all the MSX BIOS ROMs that were built into the original machine. The emulator is actually of an MSX, MSX2 and MSX2+ with the ROMs for all these machines!

Marat is still developing fMSX up to version 2.0, and so we can look forward to a much improved emulator, since as soon as the source is released, David has promised to port it to the Acorn. Although the first released versions of the emulator were RISC PC only, v0.20 works on non-RISC PCs too. Note: to run David's emulator, you will need to get hold of the Acorn Toolbox modules!

You can change the fonts used via the frontend, and even run the emulator in a minimal 16 colour mode. The screenshots on this page are from Aleste, VKiller and Nemesis running on the Acorn port of fMSX, as you can see, the graphics are pretty good for an 8 bit system!

There is also now an MSX emulator written in Java available.

fMSX Speed Rating: ARM 2 - Too Slow, ARM 250 - Too Slow, ARM 3 - Slow, ARM610 - Slow, StrongARM - Perfect

Emulators:
fMSX 0.20 (284Kb ZIP file)
David Mcewen's Acorn fMSX Page
Marat Fayzullin's fMSX Page

javaMSX

Software:
Dave's Arcade Classics MSX ROMs
MSX ROMs

Recommended software:
Aleste, VKiller (great castlevania style game)