The History of Master System / SG-1000 Emulators - Part 1

Massage (1996)

Massage

Massage was created in July 1996 by Scottish James McKay, with its first version released in October of the same year for MS-DOS, thus being the first Master System and Game Gear emulator in history. Its name is the abbreviation of Master System And Game Gear Emulator. Also in 1996, it allowed online games, having been the first Master System emulator to provide this support, even though this feature was not yet debugged as it should have been. Its bug-free version was released in August 1997. The emulator emulated sound, supported two controllers, the Pro Action Replay cheat code, save state and screenshot. The emulator also came with a simple interface, and had better game compatibility than its competitor MasterGear. Its sound emulation, the YM2413 FM, came from the hands of Hiromitsu Shioya. His emulator was initially paid. The emulator project initially began as an extension of James's other emulator, the X128, which emulated the ZX Spectrum computer. In February 1997, the emulator's official website changed to Sega Master System World, covering the Master System scene, and in 1998 to Sega Emulator World, covering the Sega emulation scene. By 1998, James had grown tired of the project, and released a free version of the emulator in January of the same year to mark its end, promising a final version soon after, which was unexpectedly released as a paid version in April of the same year.

Massage (Interface)

A year later, he promised to release version 1.0, which only ended up happening two years later in March 2001, now for free. This is considered the most stable version of the emulator. It was dated October 1998. The version was released by the webmaster of Sega Emulation World, Stephen Sharp. The author did not even bother to release his own version. The text says that the project was over, and that other better emulators were on the market, such as Meka. The site ends on the same date as the release. From February 2000 to November 2003, James worked on an emulator that supported several consoles, such as the 8-bit consoles from Sega and Nintendo, Othello Multi Vision, ColecoVision, and the MSX 1 and 2 computers. The emulator was to be released as Massage v1.2, but was never finished. In the meantime, James began to participate in the programming of games for consoles, as was the case of The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror (2001) for Gameboy Color, All-Star Baseball 2004 (2003) for Gameboy Advance, Mega Man: Anniversary Collection (2004) and Stealth Force: The War on Terror (2005) for Playstation 2 and Arctic Tale (2007) for Gameboy Advance. James also created Massage, an emulator made at the university for the PC X128, at the time of the release. He also made attempts at creating emulators for Atari 2600 and Mega Drive, but were unsuccessful. After 2007, no more was heard from James.

MasterGear (1996)

MasterGear (MS-DOS)

MasterGear was created in 1996 by Marat Fayzullin, as an emulator for Master System, GameGear and Sega Mark III. Its creation was based on technical documents about the console found on the internet. The MSX emulator that Marat developed served as the basis for the creation of MasterGear, which used technology similar to the old PC. This technology was also similar in the Game Gear portable, and in other Sega consoles, such as Sega Mark III, SG1000, and others, and it was then that Marat also added them to the emulator, naming it MasterGear. One of its first versions released was in September 1996, 0.71, for MS-DOS, with support for both Master System and Game Gear. At the time, in addition to creating its own port for Unix, it also gained ports for Macintosh by John Stiles, another for Unix by Ian Spielman and another for DOS by Thierry Lescot. 

MasterGear (Windows)

At the same time, there were also ports for RiscOS, AmigaOS, BeOS, OS/2, among others. Version 1.0 was released in December 1996. Around June 1997, the Kagi website released an online, shareware version of the emulator. Somewhere between 1997 and 2001, the emulator began supporting Sega Mark II games. In August 1998, the first version for Windows, 1.1, was released, but it was released for a fee. It was the only paid version of the emulator. Around this time, the MS-DOS version disappeared, I believe it was because of the Windows release. The initial price was $35US. From January 2005, when purchasing the Windows version, the DOS version came with it. In 2006 the price of the Windows version went to $25US, falling in 2008 to $19.99US, becoming free in March 2015, and the MS-DOS version disappeared.

MasterGear (Windows)

In October 1998, version 1.2 was released, bringing several other ports, such as for Solaris, SunOS, Linux and OSF/1. This same version also started working with the SG-1000 and SC-3000. There were other ports of the emulator, such as for WindowsCE (charging $32US), another port for Amiga and a port for PC98, both in 1998. One of these ports for PC98 was made by Bero, a Japanese creator of emulators for PSX, PC Engine and NES. He ended up porting MasterGear to PSX in 1997. In June 1998, the PSX version had bugs fixed by Rasky from the Psyke and PSEmu Pro projects, also for PSX. There were also versions for OS/2 and Nintendo 64 (known as UltraSMS) in 2000, Dreamcast (known as DreamSMS) in 2001, as well as a port for the FM-Towns computer. And finally, over the years there were also ports for Maemo, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and PocketPC. It was probably the NES emulator with the most ports of all.

MasterGear (Options)

In the October 2000 MasterGear version 1.4, the emulator began to support FM sound, from the famous YM2413 chip. In January 2002, they began to support SF-7000 in version 1.5. Around November 2006, they created their first mobile version, for the Symbian system of Nokia phones, for $9.99US, going up to $14.99US around March 2007, and remaining at that price until March 2015, when support was discontinued. They even had a package with the Symbian, Windows and MS-DOS versions from October 2007 for $24.98US until March 2015. In July 2011, they launched their first version for Android for $4.99US, which led to the discontinuation of their versions for PC and Nokia four years later. This price remains the same to this day.

MasterGear 4.0

Its last update was in March 2021. Marat had help from influencers at the time, such as Marcel de Kogel, helping with the port to MS-DOS, Alex Krasivsky, initial creator of the Adlib sound library, James McKay from the Massage project, as well as Ian and John from the Unix and Mac ports. Although it is not open source, Marat shares his code with those who want to port his emulator and that he trusts the project. The last Windows version of MasterGear came out in March 2021, and for Android it came out in August 2024.

Sparcade! (1996)

Sparcade! (Introduction)

The Sparcade! emulator began development in June 1995 as DASARcade by Dave Spicer. It was a classic arcade game project created from 1978 to 1989. It was the first arcade emulation project to run on more than one arcade machine/brand. In 1995, it changed its name to Sparcade! Around September 1995, it released its first version for MS-DOS. In 1996, it added support for the Master System and Game Gear. This support was provided until 1997, when it was discontinued.

Sparcade! (Game List/Pac-Man)

Dave mentioned in later versions of the emulators that Master System was part of the consoles/arcades whose drivers had not yet been completed. He also mentioned that as users requested they could be developed better, but this was not the case with Sega's console. Its last version was released in December 1999.

BRSMS (1998)

BRSMS

BRSMS (Brazilian Sega Master System) was developed by Brazilian Ricardo Bittencourt, also known as RicBit, in 1998 for MS-DOS. He was one of the first Brazilians to create emulators. The first version of the emulator is dated April 1998. It was the first Master emulator to be released for free, although three months before its release, Massage released a free version.

BRSMS (DOS/Golden Axe Warrior)

In addition to running Master System games, it also started running Game Gear games in November 1998. This was followed by the SG-1000 in January 1999, the SC-3000 in March 1999, and the latest version of the emulator in December 1999, the ColecoVision. Despite all this, what attracted the most attention worldwide was the ability to run Master System and Game Gear games at full speed using a 486, a popular computer at the time. In addition, there was sound and voice emulation, and even support for serial cables, another advance for the time. The only drawback of the emulator was that it was necessary to drag games from the folder to the emulator in order for them to run. Since it was a DOS-mode and command-line emulator, some front-ends were released to facilitate its execution.

BrSMS FRONT, BRSMS Brazilian Frontend and BRSMS Emu FrontEnd

The first was BRSMS Emu FrontEnd, created in January 1999 by ReptilE ProductionS. The second was MasterFront, created in March 1999 by Christian Schaefers. The third was BrSMS FRONT, created in January 2000 by Ben Hyland. And the fourth was BRSMS Brazilian Frontend, created in December 2001 by André Luiz Fernandes dos Santos. In August 2011, Ricardo publicly released the emulator's source code. A curious fact.

MasterFront

In November 2000, Ricardo attended the MSX User Meeting, an MSX event in Jaú, in the interior of São Paulo, as he was also a big MSX enthusiast, having created the BRMSX emulator for it in 1997, which was considered the fastest and most accurate emulator at the time. At this event, he had the opportunity to meet the Brazilian Rafael Rigues, known as Sephiroth, who converted the DarcNES emulator to DOS mode, an emulator very similar to BRSMS, as it emulated systems such as Master System, Game Gear, SG-1000 and ColecoVision.

The History of the Master System / SG 1000

SG-1000 and Sega Mark III

After the release of the SG-1000 and SG-1000 II consoles in 1983 and 1984, Sega, the classic creator of arcade games since 1973, decided to release a console that would be on par with its rival the Famicom, making some modifications to its hardware. Its name was the Sega Mark III, and it was released in Japan in 1985. Its hardware had a 3.58 MHz NEC 780C central processor (based on the Zilog Z80), 16kb of video RAM and 4 mono sound channels through the SN76489 chip. Its difference from previous Sega models was the 64 total colors and 32 simultaneous colors (the previous ones had only 16 possible colors), the VDP video processor (based on the video chip of the previous versions, the TMS9918) and the 8kb of RAM (the previous ones had 2kb of memory). The Mark III also had an add-on, an optional accessory, that brought FM sound to the console through the YM2413 chip. However, only a few games had this possibility, since they needed to be created for this purpose. Just over 40 games were created with support for FM sound. The Sega Mark III also allowed backwards compatibility, meaning that games from previous versions of the Sega console could be played on the device, either on cartridges or on cards (used in previous consoles through an add-on).

Sega Master System

For its release in the US in 1986, they built a different case for the console and renamed it the Master System. Its only differences from the Sega Mark were the inability to play games from cartridges and cards from the SG-1000, SG-1000 II and Sega Mark III (only with an adapter for cartridge games only) and the lack of support for FM sound, which in the Japanese version, released in 1987, did not exist, since it supported all cartridges and cards from Sega consoles (including the American Master System cartridges) and came with FM sound support integrated into the console, without the need for an add-on. It was common at the time for this difference in compatibility to exist due to the regionality of each console, so as to avoid competition between different countries in the production of games for the same system.

Master System II and III (Boxes)

its hardware superiority over its competitor, the Famicom, which had a CPU of 1.79 MHz versus 3.58 MHz, 2kB of RAM and video versus 8kB of RAM and 16kB of video, and despite 48 total colors and 25 simultaneous colors versus 64 total colors and 32 simultaneous colors, neither in the Sega Mark III era nor in the Master System era did it surpass Nintendo's console in sales. Despite this, it was very successful in Europe and Brazil, being released in 1987 and 1989, respectively. In 1990, Sega released a second version of the console in the US and Europe, called the Master System II, a compact version of the device, later released in Brazil as the Master System III Compact. The Master System II in Brazil, released in 1991, was the same original Master System, but with a lower price and with Alex Kidd In Miracle World in memory.

Master System Games

Among its games, several successful franchises began on the device or came to it from the arcades, such as racing games, such as Enduro Racer, Ayrton Senna's Super Monaco GP ii, Chase HQ, OutRun, Hang-On and Road Rash; puzzle games, such as Flash Point, Lemmings and Columns; sports games, such as FIFA, California Games, World Cup, Sega World Tournament Golf and the Great line of games, such as Golf, Baseball Masketball and others; action/platform games, such as Action Fighter, Alex Kidd, Ghostbuster, Wonder Boy, Ninja Gaiden, Strider, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Golvellius, Asterix, Sonic Chaos, Kenseiden, Psycho Fox, Jurassic Park, Earthworm Jim and Sonic The Hedgehog; and beat 'em up games, such as Double Dragon, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Black Belt, Streets of Rage and Renegade. Shmup/shoot em up games include Operation Wolf, After Burner, Space Harrier, Fantasy Zone, Power Strike, R-Type and Galaxian. Fighting games include Virtua Fighter Animation and Mortal Kombat II. And RPGs include Phantasy Star, Golden Axe Warrior and Dragon Crystal. There were also games from companies such as Disney, such as Mickey (Legend, Land and Castle of Illusion), The Lion King, Donald Duck, Aladdin and The Jungle Book. DC Comics, such as The Flash and Batman Returns and Superman: The Man of Steel. Marvel, such as Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin and Return of the Sinister Six, The Incredible Hulk and X-Men: Mojo World. And Warner, such as Taz-Mania and Escape from Mars, Daffy Duck (Daffy Duck In Hollywood), Desert Speedtrap, Cheese Cat-Astrophe, Tom and Jerry (The Movie) and The Flintstones. Anime games were also released, such as Zillion, Borgman and Hokuto no Ken. Although there was no direct competition with the Famicom, the two consoles competed for several ports, such as Aladdin, Alien 3, Asterix, Back to the Future, Battletoads, Bubble Bobble, Juggle Book, Lion King, Operation Wolf, Pacman, Paperboy, Robocop 3, Strider, Terminator, Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon, Jurassic Park and others. Last but not least, Brazilian games, such as Mônica no Castelo do Dragão, Chapolin x Drácula, Férias Frustradas do Pica-Pau, Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum, TV Colosso and others.

Master System II and III (Consoles)

The console was discontinued in 1989, however, in the USA it continued until 1991 and in Europe until 1996. In Brazil it is still sold today, with games produced in the country until the end of the 1990s. The country in which the console was most successful was undoubtedly Brazil.

Master System releases in Brazil:

Master System (1989)

Master System II (1991)

Master System 3D (1991)

Master System III Compact (1992/1993/1998)

Master System Super Compact (1993)

Master System Super Girl (1993)

Master System III Collection (2002)

Master System III Collection (2004)

Master System III Collection (2005)

Master System III Collection (2006)

Master System III Collection (2007)

Master System III (2008)

Master System III Evolution (2011)

Master System® Plug & Play (2018)

Master System® Portable (2018)

The History of NES Emulators - Part 6

Squeem (2000)

Squeem (MS-DOS)

Squeem was released in February 2000 for MS-DOS by Dead Body, and already came with its own interface (GUI) created by the author. Squeem was one of the pioneers in adding sound, video and control plug-ins to NES emulators. According to its creator, Dead Body, who was only 15 at the time, did not know that the Pretendo emulator had done the same thing a year earlier. The creators of Pretendo later ended up helping him with the project. Dead did everything from scratch, taking inspiration from the plug-ins of the first PS1 emulator, PSEmu Pro. At first, it ran without sound, was accelerated, had bugs and had few compatible games. Also in February, its second version was released, this time for Windows. Dead alternated between releases, sometimes with a version for Windows, sometimes with a version for DOS.

Squeem (MS-DOS)

In March, it adds support for plug-ins, along with its own video (Glide) and joystick plug-ins, as well as full-screen mode. In April, it begins supporting save states, Famicom DiskSystem, sound plug-ins, frameskip, and rewrites its mapper system and creates its own 6502 emulator, called Dead6502. From the beginning, it used Neil Bradley's m6502 emulator, which it continued to use for a while until it implemented its own. In May, it adds scanlines mode and Game Genie. In December, it completely rewrites the emulator. Its latest version is released in April 2001. It comes with support for netplay and several video and sound modes, mostly DirectX plugins (remember that the plug-ins were downloaded separately).

Squeem (Windows) (Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf)

Another of its distinguishing features was the choice of CPU cores. It offered three of its Dead6502 cores, in addition to Matt Conte's Nes6502 and Shu Kondo's s6502 cores. It also offered the possibility of choosing the APUs, which were audio processors, offering those from Matt Conte and Xodnizel and palettes from Chris Covell, Matt Conte, Kevtris and Roni. For a better experience, you needed to test the plug-ins, processors and palettes with each other and see which one was the best compatible. Sometimes certain combinations would mutate the game or speed it up, for example. The project also supported screenshots in .BMP format and pause (already in the first versions), reset (already in the latest versions) and screenshots in .PCX format (in the latest version), among others. Squeem was a very promising emulator, with a project for a Linux version even started after its last release, but never released. Dead Body created another NES emulator in 2002 called Marijuanes and only one version was released.

Nintendulator (2002)

Nintendulator

Nintendulator was a project started by Quietust using a recently failed emulator called NinthStar NES by Akilla as a base, with only one version released in January 2001. NinthStar initially wanted to become a multi-console system, but the idea ended up being abandoned along with the project. Quietust reworked several things in the emulator. It also used mapper DLLs from the NESten emulator until April 2003.

Nintendulator (Interface)

Among its various options, it ran well-known NES game formats of the time, such as NSF, UNIF, iNES and FDS, the latter belonging to Disk System games. It also supported Game Genie, four controls, save state and video recording. Throughout its existence, it had very few releases, being released in June 2002 for Windows, and having another nine updates in March 2005, January 2006, June 2009, January 2010, August 2014, January 2019, March and July 2022 and July 2024. Nowadays, it is considered, alongside Nestopia and FCEUX, one of the three most popular NES emulators.

Nestopia (2003)

Nestopia

Nestopia was developed in mid-2002 by Martin Freij in C++. The first version was released in June 2003 for Windows, and its distinguishing feature was its CPU requirement, with a minimum processor requirement of 800 MHz, which was not a small feat at the time. This was due to its high emulation accuracy. It was also known as one of the emulators with the greatest game compatibility. All of this made it considered the best emulator of all time, and it is still used today, even after its discontinuation. The emulator supported the main tools of the NES and its competing emulators, such as CPU/PPU synchronization, netplay kaillera, image filters, support for VS System and Disk System, games in UNIF, FDS, NSF, INES and other formats, Game Genie, save state, video and sound recording in AVI and WAV, screenshot, as well as support for various controls and keyboards. It also allowed sound customization, with changes in multiple channels, noise, bit, hertz, between mono and stereo, and allowed choice of sound driver to use. And video customization, with changes in resolution, filters, bits, palettes, brightness, saturation, color, hue, and also choice of video drivers. Other features included having an NSF file player, which were the original NES sound files, and a ROM editor, with changes between NTSC, PAL, RAM and ROM memory, for console or arcade, horizontal or vertical screen, among others. Like many other projects, it had help from many influencers in the field, such as Marat Fayzullin from iNes with documents, Matthew Conte with audio processing information, CaH4e3 from the FCEU-MM project with mapping information, Xodnizel from FCE Ultra also with mappings, Yoshi with the nestech.txt documentation, among many others.

Nestopia (Beetlejuice)

The MacOS X version was released in December 2003 by Richard Bannister, a leading name in ports and emulators for Macintosh, who continued to update it even after the original project ended. The last update to the Mac version was released in May 2021. There was also another version for MacOS X around July 2007 by Deamoncollector. The Linux version was released in May 2007 by Richter Belmont, who had left the Emuhype project, which developed emulators for arcades. The last version of Nestopia was released in June 2008. The emulator had 32 updates in total. There was an attempt to port it to the Nintendo 3DS called Nestopia3DS in 2006, but this never came to fruition. Nestopia was ported to the Xbox in 2010 by Nes6502 under the name NestopiaX. It was also ported to the PS3 under the name NestopiaPlus, also running on Linux and Windows, and to iOS as just Nestopia, both in 2013. Also in 2013, it was added to the OpenEmu multi-system emulator for MacOS X. Nestopia has always been open source, which has led to the creation of several ports and forks of it. In March 2010, a hack of the emulator was created by Keith Kelly, known as Nestopia 1.41.1 Unofficial. Its purpose was to fix a joypad lag in the original emulator that consisted of a delay when the VSync option was activated. In May 2011, it was updated by Geestarraw, adding full-screen support for secondary monitors on PCs with more than 1 monitor. The same author created another update in September 2012. In January 2013, notBald modified the Geestarraw version by adding several image filters. He creates versions 1.41.2 and 1.41.3 in the same month. 

NestopiaEU (Basewars)

NestopiaEU (Menus)

A little earlier, in late 2012, Dan Brook created a fork of Nestopia, called Nestopia Undead Edition (something like a living-dead edition), known as Nestopia UE. This project combines updates from the versions by Geestarraw, Keith, notBald (more later), and the 1.40 AH version for MacOS X by Bannister. The emulator was released for Windows and Linux (it also runs on Open/Free/NetBSD, in addition to Ubuntu) also in 2012, and in January 2016 it was ported to MacOS X, among other systems. The project added, among others, a new interface (GUI), fullscreen mode with native resolution, OpenGL rendering and save state in SRAM (i.e. for read-only devices). Its main updates were versions optimized for several different systems. Nestopia UE was ported around February/March 2013 to LibRetro/RetroArch by themaister (creator of RetroArch) and twinaphex. In 2020, Rupert Carmichael joined Nestopia EU, helping Brook with the project. Nestopia EU was last updated in March 2024.

Other Emulators

FakeNES and No$nes

G-NES

There were other NES emulators, such as Vortendo, Famtasia, NesEM, Mesen, LoopyNES, G-Nes, FakeNES, madNES, no$nes, PlasticNES, QuickNES, TNES, Nezulator, VirtuaNES, uNESsential, DNES, as well as AmiNES, CoolNESs and A/NES, both for Amiga, Nestra and TuxNES for Linux, Godlenes for Atari Falcon, Graybox and QNES for MacOS, among many others. The NES had around 100 emulator projects. Without a doubt the console that generated the most emulators in history, following its history as one of the most popular video games of all time.

VirtualNES and NEZulator

PlasticNES and LoopyNES

Regarding versions for consoles and portables, in addition to those already mentioned above, there were many others, such as for the Dreamcast, PS1, PS2, PS3, N64 consoles, the portable GB, GBA, NDS, Gamepark 32, GP2X, the Java and JavaScript systems, the portable Windows Phone, iOS, Android, PalmOS systems, in addition to the Pocket PC's, totaling dozens of emulators and ports.

NESten and Mesen

uNESsential and TNES

In multisystem emulators, it ran on NesMac (from GB and GBC) in 1997 for MacOS, SmartGear (from GameBoy Color, GameGear and Sega Master System) and MESS (from computers and consoles) both in 1998, Yame (from TurboGrafx 16, SNES and GB) in 2002, MAME (from arcade) in 2004, CrabEmu (from Sega 8 Bits and ColecoVision) in 2015 and VDMGR (from ColecoVision, MSX, Sega 8 Bits and others) in 2017.

MS-DOS: RADARnes, FakeNES, DragoNes, uNESsential, TNES, Nezulator, NesEM, NES-Lord, madNES, PlasticNES, LoopyNES, mIRCNES, Utimate Nes, DNES, Emutator

Windows: G-Nes, NESten, no$nes, VirtuaNES, QuickNES, Famtasia, Vortendo, puNES, Mesen

Linux: Nestra, TuxNES

Amiga: AmiNES, CoolNESs, A/NES

Atari Falcon: Godlenes

MacOS: Graybox, QNes

 

Come and learn the history of Squeem, Nintendulator, Nestopia and Other Emulators in video on our YouTube channel.