The Sega Master System thread

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SNESPlayer
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The Sega Master System thread

Post by SNESPlayer »

Recently I've been reading a little bit about this particular console and I find it strangely fascinating. It was a console where its presence was felt particularly strong in Europe and Brazil. Is also one of the few, few Japanese game consoles where its library was stronger in PAL regions than anywhere else too. What's even more interesting is how its hardware that also maintained a presence with the Sega Genesis for backwards compatibility purposes actually helped the system itself by giving it additional channels for audio on the games that used it and a whole CPU too (Z80).

I didn't grow up with this console mind you so I'd like to hear additional remarks or stories related to this console. And technical perspectives would be nice as well, I've recently seen a video of someone porting the original Castlevania to it with updated graphics (albeit proof of concept) and that was pretty cool to watch.
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by nesrocks »

It could have been a strong contender against the NES wasn't it for Nintendo getting a hold of nearly all relevant developers. Sega had to port and develop everything themselves and the quality was often lacking. There are some great games though and I particularly love how it sounds. It has an arcade feeling to it.
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lidnariq
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by lidnariq »

Sega also insisted on doing all the (early) ports themselves.

For whatever reason, I've just not seen many instances pushing the capabilities particularly well. Lots of not-particularly-well-drawn sprites with not-particularly-well-drawn backgrounds, engines that don't take advantage of uploading content during active display, and a really lackluster sound chip.

Do note that there's a separate website smspower.org with its own forum for the Master System and other pre-Megadrive consoles, and they're friendly.
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by Pokun »

Despite growing up with Nintendo, I do love the Sega Master System and the Mark III it's based on, and it's very fun to program. It's basically a Sega SG-1000/SC-3000 but with more modernized video hardware, and the SG-1000/SC-3000 is in turn much like an MSX1 but without the BIOS so you get complete control of the hardware yourself (the Master System of course has a bootstrap-ROM though but it doesn't do much). It's probably the best Z80-based 8-bit home console in general (counting the MSX as a home computer).

Although the PSG is comparable to the AY-3-8910 of the MSX, it is indeed lackluster compared to the NES' powerful APU, and it's a bit strange that they didn't upgrade it with the Mark III. The Japanese Master System comes with the OPLL FM-chip which is capable enough, so it's just too bad that Sega removed it from the export Master System along with the SG-1000-/SC-3000-compatible cartridge port (they thankfully kept the Sega My Card port however). Also since the Mark III couldn't use the PSG and OPLL at the same time, no games does that despite the Master System being able to, meaning sound is either PSG-only or OPLL-only depending on what is detected.

Besides the Master System / Mark III being technically backwards-compatible with the SG-1000/SC-3000 and forwards-compatible with the MD and the Game Gear, the Atari-style joystick port used since the SG-1000/SC-3000 days is technically used and supported up to the Saturn although with a different connector.

Master System and Mega Drive were both more popular in PAL regions than in NTSC regions, with Scandinavia being a notable exception where Nintendo ruled like in North America and Japan. I remember a friend who had a "Sega" (probably Master System) but almost everyone else had a "Nintendo" (NES) in Sweden.
Sega were kings in the arcades though, like Nintendo they are veterans that have made arcade games since electro-mechanical times, and since Nintendo changed to focus on consoles the arcades were free for Sega to take.
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by SNES AYE »

The Master System was my first console, and I used to think and even argue it was much better than the NES, probably because it could display obviously-nicer visuals, but--and it took some time for me to figure it out--I eventually came to understand the the NES really was ultimately the better overall system for me, and actually by quite some ways, because I consider the experiencing of playing a great game on a great console is about more than pure visuals or even various technical specifications, it's the complete experience, and I just found the NES had the vastly superior games library, perfectly serviceable visuals, better audio, and a controller that was a step up and just felt better in every way too. I still have a lot of nostalgia for the Master System, and it's amazing to see what people are doing to push it technically in modern times, but I now realise I would switch across to the NES side in a heartbeat if I could go back in time and choose again. So, yes, the Master System is a solid little system in its own right, but I get now why the NES dominated that console generation. Turns out my friend was right all along.
Last edited by SNES AYE on Thu Feb 09, 2023 8:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by Pokun »

Well the NES is a bit lacking in color which allows the Master System to beat it quite easily with its larger number of total colors, although it is lacking in palettes with only 2 against the NES' 8.
Ultimately though the NES got better 3rd-party support and therefore has a better game library which is what really matters to the player in the end.
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tokumaru
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by tokumaru »

I love the Master System, it's definitely one of my favorite consoles. When I was a kid I didn't bother with owning the "best" console, I just wanted to play games that were fun, even if they were not cutting edge. I got a Master System a couple of years into already owning a Genesis, and had a lot of fun with both consoles. I was definitely a SEGA kid, but would occasionally play NES (Famiclones, actually - only once I've seen an actual NES before I started collecting consoles) and SNES at friends' houses.

I just think it's a shame that the Master System didn't get the kind of support from developers that the NES did (no matter the reason), because it was a pretty decent piece of hardware and I bet that we'd have seen many more impressive titles if the system was more popular in the US.

Its main advantage over the NES is definitely the number of colors per tile, which can result in games looking one generation ahead when used competently. I know that the sound is inferior, but as long as the melodies are cool, the sound capabilities hardly make a difference for me. Another noticeable difference seems to be the CPU - I never coded for the Master System, but to me it just looks like games lag more easily. This could be on the programmers though, not the hardware.
Pokun wrote: Wed Feb 01, 2023 5:13 pmit is lacking in palettes with only 2 against the NES' 8.
Not a significant disadvantage when 1 SMS palette has more usable colors than 4 NES palettes - you can mimic NES visuals on the SMS (look at those unofficial Mega Man ports, for example) but not the other way around. There are less tiles overall though, and you can't cheat and have the cartridge improve certain graphical capabilities like you can on the NES.
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by TmEE »

I grew up with famiclones but eventually my father got an SMS too with two games. I did definitely notice the more colors right away and also the different sound though I didn't think it was better or worse but I only had two games to compare against hundreds of NES/FC games. Nowdays I have explored the library quite a bit and unfotunately it doesn't have anywhere near as many great games as NES does. Sometimes I wonder what would things be like if Capcom and others were able to do games for the machine too...

Eventually I began writing a game for the machine and it was quite straightforward. Z80 I already knew from MD end of things and the video system is a clear predecessor of MD also so getting into it was quite easy. The main "wtf" thing is that Y scroll register is latched for whole frame, so you cannot do any vertical scroll things with it... It does give you locked rows and columns mode but they don't help a game that wants to scroll in every direction. This is what I consider an actual design flaw in the machine and it makes no sense either from hardware design standpoint. It will take more parts to do things the way they are done than in a way where the register is freely available to change throughout the frame...

The main advantage of NES is VROM, all the GFX comes straight from the cartridge. Full screen or any other animations are very easy. SMS does have much higher VRAM bandwidth (you can update sezeral tens of tiles per frame, and even multitude of bytes per active line), but it only really matters when you compare it to UNROM or such. Built in line interrupts are also handy, no need for MMC3 or other mappers.

Other advantage of NES is that all the sound channels can actually do bass notes, which SMS cannot (~110Hz is octave too high). Unfortunately YM2413 was not a thing in US/EU, it could have bridged the gap... Noise channel is superior though, at least when it uses one tone channel's freq. Then you get 1024 pitches but in the normal mode it is a bit lackluster indeed... There isn't a DMC channel equivalent but if you are really desperate for samples you can use use CPU grunt to play some and multiple games actually do that, some with pretty good results. I did a number of experiments around it in past too, with some results attached to this post. SMSPCM0 is naive 4bit samples, SMSPCM1 is taking the logarithmic scale into account and SMSPCM is packing two samples into one byte for doubled sample rate.
SMSPCM.zip
(708.1 KiB) Downloaded 31 times
One interesting thing about SMS is that its BGs actually use all 16 colors of a tile, color 0 is still transparent for a sprite but it does get shown so you actually do get all 32 colors possible on the screen from the available palettes without any additional updates. (and you can use a line interrupt and update the palette, Sonic games use it for underwater sections for example). You do get bus contention artifacts at the moment of update but this can be managed with effort.

Other difference compared to NES is that you can only flip BG tiles, sprites don't have that, so exactly opposite. In some ways it is useful, in other ways not so much. I have aways favored proper lighting for sprites and this sort of forces needing separate GFX for sprites facing different directions (unless you have CPU power to burn on flipping the bits yourself). Overall I have found that having flipping on BG tiles is more important, it lets my GFX converter fit more complex stuff on the screen as there's nearly always duplicate tiles in some fashion even when I don't actively draw the art to try to have such for optimisation purposes. Getting a full screen image is still an undertaking though...

Biggest advantage of SMS is something else though, the cartslot of US/EU machines has two signals that no other machine does : Bus Request and Bus Grant, they allow the cart to take over CPU bus and push GFX to VRAM as fast as the VDP can take it (which is a lot faster than Z80 can, 12KB per frame in 50Hz or 7KB in 60Hz, good enough to compete with VROM banking on NES). I devised a cartridge with an AVR chip years ago that I never completed, called SMSDMA. I even got PCBs made and slowly began working on the software for AVR but it never got very far (one hurdle was not actually able to upload data into the MCU and lacking funds for a dongle that could). It was basically being a DMA engine and also a softsynth pushing samples into "PSG as DAC", overcoming the sound limits such as no bass octave. It could also do general processing as it can access RAM and ROM too and do tasks that Z80 might struggle with but then it stops being a SMS game lol.

I think this will be it for now lol
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aa-dav
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by aa-dav »

I neved had one. But I was impressed by official programming manual 5 years ago. It is something about 20 pages long including examples. Glossary of DirectX API has to have more. :)))
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by SNESPlayer »

To add a bit more info, here's a really good article by Copetti on the architecture and internals of the Master System
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consol ... er-system/

There was recently a discussion about nametables and tiles and all that terminology varying between consoles. The SMS called tiles 'characters' here! (Well, according to SEGA, due to SMS space of VRAM dedicated to tiles called the Character Generator)
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by Fisher »

Wow that's interesting.
As a kid I always wanted a Master System, but it was too expensive and didn't have any games for sale o the small street shops we oftem call "camelôs".
Just a while ago I received a pretty beaten up PCB of one as a "gift" and started working to fix it.

It's really nice to finally have it working, with a few workarounds to use components I have at hand, like an NES crystal.
As I have not played much games of its library, but it looks there are pretty good ones, pretty odd ones and others that feel just bland, like the NES but on a very smaller scale.
Some of them seem to have had the sprites drawn by someone that didn't have much experience or was very rushed.

I guess that if all softhouses could work on it back on the day we probably would have an interesting console war on the 8 bit "territory". lol
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by Jedi QuestMaster »

Would you guys say the Game Gear library is better or worse than the Master System lineup?

I ask because, growing up, my only real connection to the SMS was through Game Gear. From my experience, the games were very good:
• Jurassic Park
• Asterix & the Great Rescue
• X-Men: Gamesmaster's Legacy
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Sonic 2
• a fighting game I don't remember, but I think might be Streets of Rage 2

I did manage to play some Master System games via emulation:

• Ghouls 'n' Ghosts (why didn't the NES ever get this?)
• Rastan (not nearly as good as the arcade, but wow - that maze level!)
• Running Battle (from what I remember, this was a little janky)
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by TmEE »

GG is more or less portable SMS, and it ended up getting more of the games than SMS since it was around for longer, some pretty good too. There are a number of GG games ported to SMS now too.
SNESPlayer wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 12:55 pm To add a bit more info, here's a really good article by Copetti on the architecture and internals of the Master System
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consol ... er-system/
This is a good read, though there's a nitpick : The "periodic noise" mode is described wrong, tone 3 freq has nothing to do with it, but it simply is LSFR feedback gets disabled so single bit is shifted through the 16 positions and thus you get the 6.25% duty cycle squarewave with the very low freq, though because it is such a narrow duty cycle it won't still make for a particularly good bass sound (but a number of games do use it as such).
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by creaothceann »

Jedi QuestMaster wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 8:39 pm • Ghouls n' Ghosts (why didn't the NES ever get this?)
Maybe there were no programmers available, or technical difficulties, or it would've cost too much. The NES version of the prequel (Ghosts 'n Goblins) wasn't even programmed by Capcom directly.
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Re: The Sega Master System thread

Post by tokumaru »

The SMS port of Ghouls 'N Ghosts wasn't very good... I wish they did a better job with that. As a fan of the series and the console, I still own a copy of the game, but I hardly ever played it.

I always wanted a port of Ghouls 'N Ghosts for the NES! I even redrew a bunch of the art myself some 15 years ago hoping I would code it one day... I don't think I even have those graphics anymore.
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