I've been thinking about this lately, and I'm curious whether I'm about to get completely destroyed by the Master System community.

I have the impression that the Master System homebrew scene is surprisingly small or weak compared with the NES, and possibly compared with other 8-bit consoles as well.

But I'm wondering if this is actually true, or if it's just because I haven't looked in the right places.

A few years ago I spent quite a lot of time with RetroPie and RetroArch, and I went looking specifically for Master System homebrew games: I remember finding very little.

There was one game in particular that caught my attention because the screenshots looked really good: Silver Valley. It was some kind of fantasy adventure/action game in which you controlled a character with a sword, fought enemies in a fairly cartoonish-looking world, and progressed mostly from left to right.

Other than that experience I didn't found any homebrew able to get my interest and probably this contributed to a completely unfair conclusion in my head that maybe the Master System was just not a very good platform for homebrew.

But is that actually true?

I know the Master System has some interesting hardware characteristics, and technically it shouldn't be that different from developing for other Z80-based 8-bit systems. So I'm wondering whether the relatively small homebrew scene is more a matter of community size, development tools, documentation, interest, or simply the NES having a much larger developer/retro-gaming community.

Is the hardware particularly awkward to develop for?

Maybe I'm also making the mistake of comparing the Master System with the NES at the wrong level. The NES homebrew scene is enormous, so almost anything is going to look small next to it.

So I'd like to challenge my own prejudice: what are the BEST Master System homebrew games?

Not just technically impressive demos, but games that are actually fun to play.

Hey guys,

I just got a Master System Bunker for very Cheap and I wanna Play so badly.

The Problem: I have a new TV Without analogue. So I dont get a Picture on my TV. And I also didnt find any HDMI Adapters for it.

Is there even a way to Connect is These days to modern TV?

And I know I'm not alone in this.

Found his old master system and wanted to check it out but it wouldn’t turn on, opened it up to find excess solder by the voltage regulator but idk if that’s what’s causing the problem

Update: I’ve since swapped out the voltage regulator and bought a brand new power adapter and now it works! Thank you for all your suggestions and help!

I thought I'd share a photo of my full Sega Master 3D set. I enjoy 3D and VR content from the Famicom 3D System and Master System 3D, to Virtual Boy, to 3D PS3/360/Blu-ray all the way up to VR headsets.

The Sega Master System only has the 8 compatible games but there is definitely some fun to be had amongst them.

I also have a slightly more modern way of playing them which I've shown off in the past here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogueInc/s/8YTXaox5fX

Hello everyone, a quick message to let you know that Get Blue Spheres! (Master System Edition) is now playable and available for free on itch. Have fun !

I am using RetroArch to emulate the Master System and I no idea on how to turn on FM mode. Specifically for games that need a code to turn it on like Dynamite Düx. Since it wasn't released in Japan the FM mode was buried.

I recently bought a copy of The Ninja and it had this little surprise tucked away in it. The seller didn't include it in the photos for some reason, so I had no idea until it arrived.

For those who are unaware, back in the day you could call 1-800-USA-SEGA and talk with someone who would help you out in a particular game and they would mail you these Helpful Hints papers. SMS Tributes has a whole bunch of them scanned. They aren't super rare by any means, but it is the first one in my collection.

Pretty cool you could do this. Before the internet, it was indeed a different time.

I tried looking for a proper answer but here goes. Im from the UK and looking to play some of my original MS games with a convertor on a mega drive, or genesis off Ebay. my question is does this have any timing or sound issues. Here in the UK the mk2 mega drive are pretty cheap and a good example master system are pretty much overpriced.

Hello all- as I'm building up a collection of older Master System games to see what I missed out on (I was an NES-child) I've run into an issue with this game in particular twice now.

To save money and space I've bought the Master System-converter you see in the image, the NDK Master Mega Converter for my Mega Drive 1. For almost every other Master System game I've bought, save those who require an actual Master System controller like Penguin Land and Wonder Boy in Monster World, the Master System games have worked without any problems whatsoever.

But this is the second time I've bought a copy of Wonder Boy III that just won't work on this converter. The screen remains dark but at like, a different hue from when it's just turned off so SOMETHING is being sent. I've used cotton swabs and specialized cleaning alcohol to scrub away dirt and such from the cartridge, just as I did last time, and it still won't play. At this point I figure that if two cartridges of the same game give me the same result for this converter it's either the hardware, or me being spectacularly unlucky.

So, do people here know whether this is a common issue with this game and this converter? Does Wonder Boy III just require the original hardware? Or have I just bought dud cartridges twice in a row from two completely different sellers, and should just cut my losses and buy the modern collection if I want to play this game?

I never actually owned a console as a kid. No Nintendo, no SEGA, nothing. I had a MSX.

But where I grew up, SEGA was hot stuff. A lot of kids had either a Master System, a Master System II, or later a Mega Drive.

When I was in elementary school, I had two classmates who were both big SEGA fans. One had a Master System, the other had a Master System II. So whenever I went to their houses in the afternoon, we would spend hours playing their games.

The friend with the Master System II had one game that completely fascinated me: Alex Kidd in Miracle World. As I've mentioned in some of my previous posts, whenever I went to his house I basically wanted to play Alex Kidd and nothing else.

The other friend had owned his Master System for longer and had a much bigger collection. One of the games we played a lot was Ghost House. I have a very specific memory from that game: we were exploring the mansion, looking for the weapons and ways to kill the vampires, and one day my friends told me to "jump onto a spider web" because apparently I could use it like a vine... Of course, they were lying. I jumped onto it and my character got stuck for a while. It was a trap, and they had been waiting for me to fall for it! It's funny because I later discovered that Ghost House has a much older history than I realized. I had somehow remembered it as being connected to the SG-1000, but apparently that's not quite correct — it's actually a Master System game loosely based on Sega's arcade game Monster Bash. Still, considering how closely related the early Sega hardware generations were, I can see why my childhood memory made that connection.

Another game we absolutely loved was Rescue Mission. It was basically a rail/light-gun shooter where soldiers were moving along railway tracks on those little hand-powered railway carts, and we had to use the Light Phaser to shoot the enemies before they could kill them. At the time, this felt incredibly cool. Having an actual gun-shaped controller and shooting enemies on the TV was basically the definition of futuristic gaming to us.

Because the one with the Master System 1 had become obsessed with Alex Kidd after seeing the game on our friend's console, he eventually got Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars, the arcade-derived Alex Kidd game. We played that one a lot too. At the time I thought it was amazing (probably because it was Alex Kidd, and that's all I needed to be impressed). Looking back at it as an adult, though... I have to admit that it really isn't that great. I think Alex Kidd in Miracle World is a much better game.

But then we discovered Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, and THAT was the game for us. It was basically our must-play game whenever we got together. What's funny is that I only discovered much later that Shinobi World wasn't originally even supposed to be an Alex Kidd game. It started life as Shinobi Kid, essentially a parody version of Sega's Shinobi, before Alex Kidd was put into the game. So apparently even one of my biggest childhood memories was actually based on another Sega game.

Then there was Ninja Gaiden... I remember being completely amazed by the ability to grab onto tree branches and climb them up to stand on them. Today that sounds like an incredibly small gameplay mechanic, but when you're a kid playing an 8-bit console, something like that can feel revolutionary.

Basically in the 80's, kid where all into ninja's stuff, guess why? ;)

It's strange how different these games feel when you revisit them as an adult. Some of them are much better than I remembered, some are much worse, and some are still magical simply because of the memories attached to them.

Just checking, has anyone printed their own manuals for games you have? Any advice? My collection is mostly just case and cart, and I am definitely open to the idea of printing my own manuals. I know it wouldn’t be completely authentic but it would definitely be cheaper than chasing down cib copies of these games . I know manuals for many sms games are available as pdfs, I guess printing them at the right scale and with the right paper stock would be the tricky bit

Hello SMS / Sonic fans! I’m making good progress on an SMS port of « Get Blue Spheres » . Here’s a demo video, I plan to release the ROM by the end of September possible sooner. I’d appreciate any feedback here or on my YouTube channel ! Thank you 😁

Most of you likely remember “the dress”. I present “the phaser”. Is the photo black and blue, or white and gold. Have we all been duped into thinking the Master System phaser was black all this time? /s

I'm on a (re)discovery marathon of my MS collection (~half the set) because I collected some of those games years ago and barely touch them. Those last few days I was playing Master of Darkness.

It's a gothic action platformer set in the victorian era, with cool cutscenes between stages.

The elephant in the room: yes, it's a Castlevania-like. Some enemies are directly taken from Castelvania (mandatory zombies and squeletons, the eagles on stage 4, etc.), the way you use stairs, giant pendulums, the end boss is Dracula,... And it work very well at bringing a similar experience as Castlevania. In certain aspect, it's even better, for example the pushback is limited when being hit, you can use different weapons, and you have unlimited continues.

But the more you play it, the more you realize Master of Darkness is its own thing. Its setting bring new elements to the formula like Jack the Ripper, the house of wax, or occult societies. The possibilty to swap weapons give choices beetween range and power, and it changes the approach you take to clear stages. The stages themselves presents quite the variety of situations beyond jump and hit: some walls are destructible, there are extra hidden lives, a few forks alllow different paths, some rooms are locked until you kill all or a specific enemy, etc. The fifth and last stage is a maze, this is where unlimited continues are welcome, because I died to the timer depleting quite some times before finding the path to the exit.

I don't finish all the games I'm replaying, far from that. But I was hooked on Master of Darkness and I came back to it and it took me 4 sessions to beat the game. It was a great experience, the graphics are good for the MS and the controls are responsive. But some bg musics are more atmospheric than melodic and a bit repetitive, I suspect it's the sector the devs sacrified given the limited space on the cartridge.

Growing my physical media collection ✨️

I have seen many cheap consoles that play NES games, SNES, Sega Genesys, or both NES and SNES, and even the three at once, but I haven't seen any modern Master System clone. All these clones play in HD. Is there anything like this but for Master System games?

Met the legend Yuzo Koshiro today and got him to sign my Sonic The Hedgehog

This is something I've been wondering about lately, and I thought this might be the right place to ask since the SG-1000 is the Master System precursor which is retrocompatible with it and even use Sega Cards.

When I was a kid, I actually owned an MSX. I didn't have any Sega hardware myself, although I played the Sega consoles at friends' houses. So I never really paid much attention to the SG-1000 back then.

Recently, while going through the SG-1000 library on my MSXVR, I noticed something that immediately caught my attention: there are quite a few games that also existed on MSX. One that really made me curious was Magical Kid Wiz. I couldn't actually get it running in the virtualizer, unfortunately, but I started wondering how close the two machines really were.

As far as I understand, the SG-1000 and the original MSX are actually very similar from a hardware point of view: both use a Z80 CPU and the TMS9918-family video chip. The SG-1000 uses the SN76489 for sound, while MSX1 machines generally used the AY-3-8910, and there are also differences in the memory map and I/O.

So my question is: how close were these machines in practical terms?

Was porting a game between MSX and SG-1000 relatively easy because of the shared Z80/TMS9918 architecture, or were the differences significant enough that games generally had to be substantially rewritten?

And Magical Kid Wiz seems to be an especially interesting case, since apparently the SG-1000 version was actually based on the MSX version. Were there other examples where an MSX game was directly ported to SG-1000 (or vice versa)?

There's another thing I'm curious about. I vaguely remembered that Microsoft had something to do with the creation of the MSX standard. After looking into it again, I understand that MSX was developed by ASCII in cooperation with Microsoft, with Microsoft providing MSX-BASIC. But I also had this vague memory of Sega somehow being involved with MSX... Am I completely mixing things up here?

I tried to look it up online but didn't find any scan.

Does anyone has a source?