The History of Master System / SG-1000 Emulators - Part 3

SMS Plus (1998)

SMS Plus (MS-DOS)

SMS Plus was created in 1998 by the well-known programmer Charles MacDonald. It was an emulator created for Master System and Game Gear with its first version released in 1998, after July, for MS-DOS. One of its first and best-known versions was released in January 1999, version 0.6.8. The version considered to be the initial version is version 0.9 from May 2000, as from that point on the emulator was rewritten from scratch. This made the emulation more accurate and more compatible. From that point on, its source code also began to be released. Versions for Windows and MacOS were also released in May 2000, respectively, by Richard Teather and Richard Bannister.

SMS Plus (MS-DOS) (Heavywight Champ)

Still in the May 2000 version, from this version onwards, the official MS-DOS version also became executable on the Playstation 1, despite still being an experimental port. The emulator had two more versions in June and July 2000, including a port for PS1, and then took a hiatus. Charles dedicated himself to other projects at the time, such as System 16 Emulator (2000), TGemu (2001), Genesis Plus (2002) and Sega System 24 Emulator (2003). The emulator returned in January 2003. In this version it no longer supports the PS1. There was an update in October 2003, and another version in August 2004. Once again there was a long hiatus, returning with its final version in February 2007 for MS-DOS, and with an exclusive version for Windows.

SMS Plus (Windows)

From May 2000 onwards, several changes began to occur, such as support for digital sound emulation, the famous Master System FM sound (replaced in the January 2003 version by Mitsutaka Okazaki's EMU2413 library), the possibility of changing regions between American and European games, support for compressed games, 10 save state blocks (the file format changed from August 2004 onwards and is not compatible with previous versions of the emulator), stereo sound for Game Gear, frame rate meter, and an update in October 2003 to emulate the Z80 CPU, among others. One of the emulator's biggest difficulties was accurately emulating the video chip.

SMS Plus (SDL)

Since it was a variation used in other consoles and PCs, such as SG-1000 and MSX, he used information from both to compose his documentation. His video emulation was only complete when he worked on the Mega Drive emulation in his Genesis Plus emulator, around 2000, when he saw information on the console's video chip, which was derived from the SMS, and compared it with that of the Master, and from there filled in the gaps that were missing in the chip emulation.

SMS Plus Dreamcast

Regarding the help from influencers in the field that Charles has, we had Shawn Hargreaves, Jean-loup Gailly and all the collaborators of the Allegro library, Mark Adler for the zLib library, Richard Mitton with his Z80 emulator, James McKay from the Message project with information about the FM YM2413 sound chip, Hiromitsu Shioya and Zoop for the emulation of the FM YM2413 itself, Paul Leaman for his YM2413 emulator for MAME, Nyef with information about interrupt behavior, Bero for his port of MasterGear for PSX, as well as Omar Cornut from Meka, Ricardo Bittencourt from BRSMS, Marat Fayzullin from MasterGear, Carlos Hasan creator of the sound API library, SEAL, Marcel de Kogel creator of the ADAMem emulator from ColecoVision and the Z80Em emulator from Zilog Z80.

SMS Plus NGC-Wii and SMS Plus PSP-PS Vita

Regarding other ports of the emulator, we have for Acorn and Linux systems in 2000, BeOS in 2001 and RiscOS in 2002, both on top of version 0.9.3 from July 2000. In January 2002, Gregory Montoir changed the July 2000 version to SDL, which facilitates ports to various systems. He himself released it for Windows and Linux. It was updated until July 2003. The only PC port that still continued to be updated was for Mac, which had its last update in November 2022.

SMS Plus Sega Saturn

Regarding ports for other peripherals, such as consoles and portables, we have for PS2 and Pocket PC in 2001, two Dreamcast ports in 2001 and 2004, two Gamepark 32 ports in 2002 and 2003, two Sega Saturn ports in 2002 and 2006, Xbox in 2002, Motorola EZX in 2003, PSP in 2007, Gamecube and Wii in 2007 (the famous SMS Plus GX, which was later taken to RetroArch, and replaced by other emulators, such as Genesis Plus GX, a port of another Charles emulator) and PS VITA in 2017. SMS Plus is the Master System emulator with the most ports after MasterGear. Regarding running on multi-system emulators, in the year 2000, Charles rewrote the Master System and Game Gear driver for the MESS emulator, which had already been running these systems since 1998. In addition, it ran on Mednafen in 2007.

Dega (2001)

Dega

Dega was a Master System and Game Gear emulator released in July 2001 for Windows by Dave, creator of DGen for Mega Drive, Final Burn for Arcade, and others. The emulator was released on the same day, July 31, that the latest version of Final Burn was announced (which ended up having some versions in 2002, when it finally ended). Dega was one of the last Master System emulators released. Dega was one of the first to consolidate the execution of the FM sound mode. It could also run .zip roms and save states in the .s00 format imported from the Meka emulator. It innovated with the Red/Blue 3D option for Master games in 3D. However, they could only be run on PCs with a separation function between Red and Blue channels. Regarding the Zilog Z80 microprocessor, Dave used his own processor emulator to work inside Dega. Version 1.05 from August 2001 adds support for the Sega Mark III.

Dega

The emulator was ported to other operating systems, such as Linux in December 2001 by Uli and Xbox in June 2003 by Hikaru (under the name Dega X). Hikaru was also responsible for porting emulators such as Nester for NES, Snes9x for Super Nintendo, Gens for Mega Drive, NeoPop for Neo Geo Pocket, Visual Boy Advance for Game Boy Advance, and others to Xbox. In April 2004, Dave released his own port for Xbox under the name DegaBox, claiming that the Dega X, ported by Hikaru, did not work on his console. After that, he stopped developing the emulator. The last release of Dega was in April 2004. In 2010, Steve Maddison planned a port of Dega for Pandora, including using Dr.Z80 used in the PicoDrive fork, another project of Dave's, but it was never released.

Other Emulators

SayaRX

In addition to the emulators already mentioned, we also had Saya RXSMS (created by a Brazilian from Minas Gerais), Chasms, Emukon, FoolsSMS, GGBoy, HiSMS, Masterlator (also ported to Game Park 32), MesaDX, NeoSMS, Osmose, SegaG3, SMaSher, TowMbit (also for Linux), vbsms+, Ghost Master and Wakalabis. Most of them ran Game Gear and some the SG-1000. It was also present in the Sega 8 and 16-bit emulators, AGES, Gens Plus!, Genesis Plus, PicoDrive and Kega Fusion.

CHASMS

There were many projects that never made it to release, such as SMSemW, Ghost Master, NextSMS (with GG support and from the same creator of NextLEVEL for Sega CD), SegaMS (also supporting GG) and MCHE32 (a port of MCHE from DOS to Windows by Atani also supporting GG and SG-1000).

Masterlator

For systems other than computers, we have Gearoid and MD.emu (from Sega 8 and 16 bits) for Android, PSMS for PS2, SMEG for Dreamcast, DrSMS, PocketSMS and SMS Advance for Game Boy Advance, Apprentice Minus DS, DSMasterPlus, DSMS (Port of SMS Advance), and S8DS (from Sega 8 Bits) for Nintendo DS, AlexKidd2x for GP2X, JavaGear for Java, Gizmo for PalmOS and CE/gg for Pocket PC.

Among the multi-emulators it has run on are MESS in 1998, MZ80 and DarcNES in 1999, FreezeSMS and Mimic in 2000, Past-O-Rama in 2001, MAME in 2003, Xe in 2004, CrabEmu in 2005, Mednafen, SmartGear in 2007, Cogwheel (later to become BizHawk in 2012) in 2008, Bee and RetroCopy in 2009, BSNES around 2009/2010, BizHawk in 2012, OpenEmu in 2013, RetroArch around 2013, Final Burn Alpha in 2015, Kindred in 2016, and VDMGR and Phoenix in 2017.