******* MasterGear ******* The Portable SEGA MasterSystem/GameGear Emulator version 0.4 (08/15/1996) by Marat Fayzullin email: fms@freeflight.com IRC: RST38h WWW: http://www.freeflight.com/fms/ * DICLAIMERS * * MasterSystem and GameGear are registered trademarks of SEGA. * The author is in no way affiliated with SEGA. * The author is in no way affiliated with any pirate group out there. * The author can not provide you with MasterSystem/GameGear games. * NEW IN THIS VERSION * * MSDOS sources (included into the archive) with sound emulation via Adlib (based on Alex Krasivsky's sourcecode). No noise emulation in MSDOS version yet. Joystick support available (press F2) but not tested. * Line interrupts work more or less reliably now, and therefore are turned on by default. Use -noline to disable. * Localization support. The default localization is English (-engl). Use -jap for Japanese localization. * Battery-backed RAM support. A .SAV file will be created if the program accesses battery-backed RAM. * Sound logging is started but not finished yet. * INTRODUCTION * MasterGear is a portable emulator of two SEGA game consoles: the MasterSystem and the portable GameGear which is basically an improved MasterSystem in a smaller package. The emulator is written in C and therefore can be ported to any computer platform out there, given that this platform can run 32-bit applications. You can always get the latest MasterGear binaries and support files from http://www.freeflight.com/fms/MG/ At this moment, MG is able to run about 75-80% of the SMS/GG carts I have, although the emulation is still far from perfection. With the help from friends I hope to make it as close to original machines as possible. If you have any information on the MasterSystem/GameGear, or the ROM-images which can be used for testing, and are willing to help, feel free to send mail to fms@freeflight.com. Any *intelligent* help is greatly appreciated :). * BUTTONS * MasterGear is controlled by following buttons: [SPACE] - FIRE-A button (also: A,S,D,F,G,H,J,K,L) [LALT] - FIRE-B button (also: Z,X,C,V,B,N,M) [ENTER] - START button (only in GameGear mode) [TAB] - RESET button (only in MasterSystem mode) [ESC] - Quit emulation (also: [F12]) [SHIFT] and [CAPSLOCK] switch between joypads when in MasterSystem mode When compiled with #define DEBUG: [F1] - Turn tracing on/off When compiled with #define SOUND: [1]-[4] - Turn sound channels on/off [0] - Turn all sound on/off [-] - Decrease sound volume [+] - Increase sound volume * COMMAND LINE OPTIONS * MasterGear can be started with following options: -verbose - Select debugging messages [1] 0 - Silent 1 - Startup messages 2 - Illegal accesses 4 - Illegal Z80 ops 8 - Bank switching 16 - Sound 32 - VDP registers -vperiod - Set VBlank period [7000ops] -uperiod - Number of interrupts per screen update [2] -help - Print this help page -sms/-gg - Run in MasterSystem/GameGear mode [-sms] -engl/-jap - Run in English/Japanese mode [-engl] -autoa/-noautoa - Autofire/No autofire for button A [-noautoa] -autob/-noautob - Autofire/No autofire for button B [-noautob] -line/-noline - Do/Don't do line interrupts [-line] -logsnd - Write soundtrack to a file [off] -trap
- Trap execution when PC reaches address [FFFFh] -shm/-noshm - Use/Don't use MIT SHM extensions for X [-shm] -saver/-nosaver - Save/Don't save CPU when inactive [-saver] When compiled with #define DEBUG: -trap
- Trap execution when PC reaches address [FFFFh] When compiled with #define DEBUG: -sound [] - Emulate sound with given quality [-nosound] 0 - Off 7 - Highest quality (4 assumed if no quality was given) -nosound - Don't emulate sound [-nosound] * NOTES * The SMS/GG programming information will be available soon at ftp.komkon.org. Both are nice little machines, logically structured and much less weird than Nintendo hardware. The CPU used is Z80, the original one, with no custom changes. Video controller seems to be based on a well known TMS9918/9928 (MSX,Coleco,TI99/4), but has only one screenmode (as far as I know), and is thoroughfully mutated in some other aspects. There is no BIOS ROM as in MSX or ColecoVision. MasterGear comes without any ROM images due to copyright reasons. Please, *do not* send me mail asking for ROM images: I can not give you any, no matter how strongly you desire to get them. MasterGear works with plain "raw" ROM images, and therefore the default file extension is .ROM. It may be a wise idea to use .SMS and .GG extensions to distinguish between MasterSystem and GameGear ROMs though: the choice of extension is not limited in any way. Some copiers add a 512-byte header to the ROM image files they create. If you see a ROM image whose size is a multiple of 16384 bytes + 512, simply cut off the first 512 bytes to et the raw image. Unix users can do it in a following way: dd if= of= skip=1 bs=512 That's it. Have fun! * THANKS * I would like to thank Richard Aplin and James McKay without whom MasterGear would have never appeared. --------------- Marat Fayzullin