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, and around other parts of Asia. This led to huge numbers of them being built and used in Russia, with hoards of Asian computer scientists growing up on the MSX, as many Brits did the Acorn. Although the MSx doesn't stand for Bill Gate's company, Microsoft did write the operating system. Although the MSX is little more than a souped up ColecoVision, the game quality is far higher than its console relative and some of the games are very playable indeed.

fMSX

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 capable of emulating an MSX, MSX2 and MSX2+, selected from the options window, with the system ROMs for all these machines included. The emulator is capable of running MSX disks, tapes and cartridges, and is very flexible in that even different fonts can be included to alter the MSX system's appearance.

This latest version is a port of v1.5 of Marat's source code, with various small improvements. An ARM code plotter has been added by David to speed the emulator up a bit on low end machines, although it is already too fast on a StrongARM and has had to be slowed down for running on that machine. A full desktop frontend is present, and the emulator can be fully configured from it, setting frameskip, disks to be loaded automatically and everything else you could possibly want.

Unfortunately sound is still not present in the emulator, but the graphics are good enough to distract you from that fact and the emulator is stable enough to be enjoyed.

David has also released a beta version of fMSX v2.00 which is a lot faster, more stable and altogether a better emulator, you should try both to see which works best for you.

fMSX v2.00b (24/1/98)
Speed Rating: ARM 2 ARM 250 ARM 3 ARM610 StrongARM
David Mcewen's Acorn Page
Marat Fayzullin's fMSX Page

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

Software:
Dave's Arcade Classics MSX ROMs
MSX ROMs
MSX Resources
MSX Games are back

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