Over the summer of 1996 I was meandering around the world-wide web when I suddenly came across a portable Sega 8-bit Emulator, which claimed to allow you to run both Sega Master System and Sega Game Gear games.

I downloaded the emulator, and to my surprise found that it compiled and ran perfectly without any alterations on the DEC Alpha Unix box I was using, although it was too slow to play and it seemed to ignore most of my keypresses. Initially I thought it wouldn't compile because one of its components (the Z80 emulator) takes several minutes to compile, but when I was finally patient enough to let it finish I was pleasantly surprised with the result.

I decided that I should try to port this emulator, which was written entirely in C, to my Risc PC - so I did! It turned out to be fairly straightforward to get it up and running, once I'd managed to work out what was doing what, although tidying up bits and pieces, adding a front-end and trying to implement sound has taken up plenty of time since.

Obviously the credit for this emulator should not be directed at me, but towards the original author, Marat Fayzullin. His web pages are at http://www.komkon.org/fms/.

There are currently two Acorn versions of the emulator available - the current release (beta-test) version and a much older but faster version. If you don't have a StrongARM you may wish to opt for the older version because it's faster, although the current version is fast enough for a StrongARM so you may as well opt for this one if you have a StrongARM. You may wish to choose this anyway, if you do not mind the speed difference.

Choose which version you'd like to find out more about, including a download link:

• The current release (beta-test) version (now 0.71)
• The older, faster version

Downloading Games

Beta-testing

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