This website started on 27th March 1997, which means today is our 29th anniversary. Every year we celebrate with creativity by running a competition and releasing new ROMs.

Here's the ROM releases. Look out for a brand new (old) version of Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Fantasy Zone with full FM music, and more Taiwanese curiosities.

Here's this year's competition entries so far - the deadline is the end of 27th March AoE...

* Main competition thread

23 coding/game entries!

* Master System SFX Generator (for Windows)
* Akalabeth1000 for SG-1000
* Arpabet Speech Synthesizer (SG-1000)
* Atoms for Master System (SMS)
* Egle in Parallel Worlds (SMS)
* El Viento Opening Demake (SMS)
* Fridge Fury (SMS)
* GLUF Tesla Frog (SMS and Game Gear)
* Intergalactic Prophylactic (alpha demo) (SMS)
* Jet Pack (SMS)
* Letter Home (SMS)
* Multicolour Mars (SMS)
* Operação Amazônia (Demo)
* Pet Factory (SMS)
* Proof of Bubbles (SMS)
* RT's Last Minute Demo (SMS)
* Road Fighter (SMS)
* Ship Schematic Demo (SMS)
* SMS Capture GO (SMS)
* Stalactites (SMS)
* Super Mario Bros. SMS Port POC (SMS)
* The 3D Maze in 3D (SMS)
* Ziggurat 3D (SMS)
(see results)

10 music entries!
* Airwolf (SMS PSG VGM)
* Green Pastures Ain't Me (SC-3000 Music, PSG VGM)
* Joy in Victory (SMS PSG+FM VGM)
* Martian Holiday (SMS FM VGM)
* Observing Jupiter Remix (SMS PSG VGM)
* Pemo Pemo Clotho - Columns III (SMS PSG VGM arrangement)
* Saint Seiya - Pegasus Fantasy (SMS PSG+FM VGM arrangement)
* Secret of Mana - Whisper and Mantra (SMS FM VGM arrangement)
* Skull King's Lair (SMS FM VGM)
* The Night Falls (SMS FM VGM arrangement)
(see results)

3 hacks entries!

* Devwill (Alex Kidd in Miracle World hack)
* Hang-On Enhanced (Hang-On hack)
* Sonic the Hedgehog Marathon Edition (Sonic the Hedgehog hack)
(see results)

Enjoy!!!!

Happy 29th anniversary to the oldest website in the (8-bits) universe!

As I am writing this, entries to our 2026 coding, music, and hacking competitions are being processed, unveiled and posted by Maxim, who will write another post probably tonight. We've got a whopping 27 entries so far and there's a slight chance the number might further increase. This seems to be our year with the most entries. Thanks everyone and be sure to check out the entries.

We've also got 9 new rom releases to share with you today!





It is 2026, and as flabbergasting as it may be, we're uncovering a previously undumped version of Alex Kidd in Miracle World! This is the 1987 Aaronix version of Alex Kidd in Miracle World, as released in Taiwan. We've covered Taiwanese games many times and I've been working for 15+ years assembling a full collection, but somehow the Mark III titles are more difficult to find than SG-1000 and GG counterparts. I had dumped many but Alex Kidd eluded me. This is now solved! The game use slightly different Traditional Chinese writing variants 悟空鬪群魔 (box, cartridge) and 悟空鬥群魔 (manual, bumper screen).




Equally emblematic, we've now got a long awaited dump of Fantasy Zone for the Master System with FM Music!. This was released in 2015 as an official modded re-release, as part of Sega 3D Classics Collection on the 3DS, and is the work of the talented M2 team. We arbitrarily decided that 10 years was fair game to get this out for all to enjoy, after many of us bought the digital version multiple times.



Love them or ignore them, Hung Tao Hsin pulled off a series of polished Game Gear releases in Taiwan that mostly used SMS games with minor modifications. We released some already here and there, and a Quote from Economy Daily News, Oct. 24 1992 suggest they were to be the official Sega distributor in Taiwan, or maybe they were already. It's unclear at this point.

HG 101-07: Ashula Story / Āxiūluó chuánqí (阿修羅傳奇) = Ashura (*)
HG 201-08: Moon Walker / Zhàn wài jiāng xīng (戰外將星) = Michael Jackson's Moonwalker
HG 201-16: Xenon II / Alien Daisakusen (エイリアン大作戦) = Xenon 2: Megablast
HG 201-26: Cloud Master / Zhōnghuá dàxiān (中華大仙)
HG 201-32: The Jungle Fighter / Dàdì yīngháo (大地英豪) = Danan - The Jungle Fighter
HG 201-38: Sagaia / Tàikōng zhàndòujī (太空戰鬥機)
HG 401-22: Altered Beast / Shòuwáng jì (獸王記)

* note that HTH also separately released Secret Command under the same product number, which we already made available.

Enjoy! And don't forget to check out the Coding, Music, Hacks Competitions 2026!

As is traditional, every year for the anniversary of the release of Phantasy Star (on 20th December 1987) we release an update to the retranslation. This year we have brought it right up to date with the addition of a translation to Latin!



There are also some tweaks to Catalan, German and French, and more significant improvements to Brazilian Portuguese. The English versions are basically unchanged since last year - it's hard to find much to improve after all these years!

As ever, we are happy to find new contributors to help maintain and update translations as well as target new languages.

Links:
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-CA
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-DE
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-EN
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-ES
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-FR
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-LA
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-PT-BR

The Video Game History Foundation has tasked us with analyzing and publishing Game Gear prototypes files recovered from backup data from Tengen. Today we are happy to announce we have 2 unreleased Game Gear titles! Albeit in early prototype state.

The files were recovered from a damaged backup from a hard drive used inside of Tengen/Time Warner Interactive. The data was all deleted! Thanks to Frank, Scott Evans and Vincent/yaz0r. Reverse-engineering guru Vincent managed to write scripts to parse and extract files from the damaged file system. From there some partial ZIP files were recovered and among the flood of data those files were extracted.




We have Two prototypes of Prime for the Game Gear. The game was only partially developed and never announced. Quoting one of the developer involved, Neil Harding: "neither Rad Mobile not Prime were released. [...] The Prime game was not completed but looked amazing, as we used Game Gear persistence of vision and double size sprites with 12 frame walk animation etc. and dual layer character map, so you had partial transparency and huge explosions.".

The game flickers alternative background and sprites images to takes advantage of Game Gear LCD screen persistence of vision, which is pretty unusual. This is used to simulate transparency effects (notably visible in level 2). Unfortunately as a result, the game will appear very flickering on most emulators. Emulicious and MAME can simulate LCD persistence, and maybe other Game Gear emulators too, but it is likely that the game can only really be experienced on an original unmodified Game Gear screen.

Overall the game feels unfinished and not very exciting, though some of the effects must have looked nice back then on a Game Gear.

Quoting Maxim, "Things to look for in Prime:
- Press 1+2 = special move with transparency effects
- Giant boss sprites (because everything is double size sprites)
- You can grab some enemies, swing them around and throw them at the screen with some bloody animations.
- The title screen sampled music can be skipped by pressing Start
- The patch makes Pause not reset/crash the game - and then you get a cool effect.
- Transparency on later levels.".

Our screenshots here and on the game page were taken using Emulicious's Frame Blending feature. I don't know if it looks accurate but it is likely the best we have now.

Only the later prototype is meaningfully playable, but we are also publishing the earlier one as it appears to have undamaged audio sample data. Follow comments for a ZIP file with a patched version of the game.
Maxim created 4 patches to slightly improve the experience:
- (A) Made the music engine not crash the game.
- (B) Corrupted audio sample sections were silenced to be easier on the ear.
- (C) Fixed a crash bug preventing to see the Pause screen.
- (D) Made music loops in Title Screen and Sound Test (in-game music stopping seems to be by design, or possibly a standin for the broken other music - it fades in at the start of the level and fades out halfway through. If you stand still it seems to go on forever.)

A VGM package will be available shortly but Maxim already made Youtube version of it.



We also have a prototype/demo for The World of Sport: Golf for the Game Gear. This appears to be an early demo developed by Atreid Concept - later best known as Kalisto - in 1993 and submitted to Tengen presumably to pitch a full title. The bumper screen has incorrect scrolling but if we manually fix the scroll register we can see that the project is also referred to as "Game Gear 3D Golf".

In addition to Frank, Scott and Vincent, were involved in this release: Maxim (reverse engineering many of the files, creating patches, creating VGM package), Bock (general org, creating assets) + additional reverse engineering contributions by bsittler, sverx, Calindro.

Enjoy!

(Tangent story ahead)
In 1999 and 2000 we managed to release roms dumps almost every single day (see our old release list). Partly due to the influx of cartridges coming from the community, but also because I got in touch with many enthusiasts sharing a same passion. Dumps were contributed by handful of people (still listed in our outdated "Contact" page: primarily from Japan: Casiopea, Enri, RedS, Sankichi, Skyhigh, Yakmo, Yujiro, and from the rest of the world: Nop Nop (France), Eric R. Quinn (USA), , TW_Diy (Taiwan), Lasse (Finland), Andrew Lindsey (UK), aRPi (Poland), Imid, Adolescent, etc. some I had the chance to met later.

1997-2004 were early heydays of releases on SMS Power, heck is was pretty much early days of emulation and preservation. Some shortcuts were taken, mistake were made (in labeling/naming, versioning, some bad dumps releases etc.).

Around 2004 I realized we needed more solid data and decided I would go and need to redump everything while paying more attention to an ever growing understanding and need for category for release/dumps variations all across the world and for all Sega 8-bit systems. This work is still ongoing as ultimately we keep on digging, finding odd stuff and filling niche gaps. But in 2004 when I started this work I created myself a "roms2/" folder next to my "roms/" folder. I decided I would only move files from roms/ to roms2/ after a dump has been not only confirmed correct, but correctly labelled (which requires knowing its source and understanding all surrounding variations so every file could be labelled correctly, which led to essentially purchase an original for everything). The roms2/ folder would be populated while the roms/ would shrink.
Since 2004 we released about 660 new roms images while I kept also sorting things from the old folder.

But somehow, two of the old sub-folders remained stubbornly uncleared. I still have 2-3 dumps in my old roms/gamegear/ folder - the files are released already but I have struggled to label them for reasons. And my old roms/sc3000/ folder kept nagging me with variety of SC-3000 Basic dumps which needed "sorting".

See, we have had Basic dumps since 1999. I knew there were variations out there but getting to the end of that analysis took an enormous procrastination route for several reasons:
- There are many regional releases: Japan, Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Finland.
- Within each country there are different variations.
- Labeling between packaging, manual and in-software is often inconsistent, which made OCD labeling trickier.
- Basic cartridges containing different amount of RAM having different product name but using same ROM data, which doesn't fit neatly in our typical way of identifying games. Typically Basic Level III A have 16 KB of RAM and Basic Level III B cartridges have 32 KB of RAM....
- ...but I also ended up finding genuine sealed Basic Level III A with 32 KB of RAM.
- Damaged cartridges could occasionally report different numbers of available memory.
- Emulators like MEKA emulating 32 KB of RAM would also report available memory that sometimes does not match a released cartridge. Emulators would need specific options (yet unprovided) to simulate all combinations accurately.
- There are variations for a same version number (e.g. two different legit dumps "SEGA SC-3000 BASIC Level 2 ver 1.0").
- Some of the Basic cartridges were tricky to dump with the hardware or method I regularly used. RAM chip wiring somehow messed up with dumpers I used; hot plugging on real hardware generally led to console crashing, SC-3000 cartridges cannot be opened without being damaged, not all Basic have access to PEEK instructions, etc. Nothing blocking really, but the sum of it made it more difficult to just quickly dump a cartridge or ask someone remote to dump it.

Anyhow. Somehow I sat on a few unsorted dumps and discovered new ones as we went on to get to the end of it. It's not that complicated.

There are 7 unique dumps. Here are how we named the files:


The unique known products so far are:

Basic Level II page (4 known products/packages, 3 unique roms)
- B-10: Basic Level II (ベーシック レベルII) (Japan) printed price = 1.0 -> rom dump is f691f9c7
- B-10: Basic Level II (ベーシック レベルII) (Japan) sticker price = 1.0 (alt) -> rom dump is cdf7bdf3
- B-10: Basic Level II A PAL (New Zealand) -> rom dump is a46e3c73
- B-21: Basic Level II B For SK-1000 (ベーシック レベルII B SK-1100専用) (Japan) -> rom dump is cdf7bdf3

Basic Level III page (14 known products/packages, 3 unique roms):
- B-30: Basic Level III A (ベーシック レベルIII A) (Japan) -> rom dump is a46e3c73
- B-30: Basic Level III A (ベーシック レベルIII A) (Japan) -> rom dump is 55f47493
- B-30: Basic Level III A - PAL (Europe) -> rom dump is 5d9f11ca
- B-30: Basic Level III A - PAL (Italy) -> rom dump is 5d9f11ca
- B-30: Basic Level III A - PAL (Finland) -> rom dump unconfirmed
- B-30: Basic Level III A - PAL (France) -> rom dump is 5d9f11ca
- B-30: Basic Level III A - PAL (New Zealand) -> rom dump is 5d9f11ca
- B-30: Basic Level III A (Australia) -> rom dump is 5d9f11ca
- B-40: Basic Level III B (ベーシック レベルIII B) (Japan)
- B-40: Basic Level III B - PAL (France) -> rom dump is 5d9f11ca
- B-40: Basic Level III B - PAL (France) (manual variations) -> rom dump is 5d9f11ca
- B-40: Basic Level III B - PAL (New Zealand) -> rom dump is 5d9f11ca
- B-40: Basic Level III B (Australia) -> rom dump is 5d9f11ca
- B-41: Basic SK III (ベーシック SK III) (Japan) -> rom dump is 55f47493

Home Basic (1 known product/package, 1 unique rom):
- B-50: Home Basic (ホームベーシック) (Japan) -> rom dump is 78a37cbc

Each page include details about manual, available bytes left.

For completeness, here's a list of common legacy dumps:


Thanks for everyone who helped:
- Ben Sittler, Yujiro Sato, Slam-Tilt 2, Dave Coursey, Murakami from Kyoto, Doc Eggfan, Andrew Kerr, Casiopea, Julian Cassin & probably others and anyone who shared photos or rom dumps over the years.

Following on our March 2023, August 2023 and September 2023 releases of newly emulated Korean multicarts, here two more.

Today we have 2 new releases, totaling 168 games(**)
(**) Marketing stunt, there are lots of duplicates!

Most of those games are using new mappers/circuit board.
Emulators which have put effort at supporting those include:
- MEKA.
- Emulicious.
- CEGA.
- Maybe MAME?
If you have an emulator author, please consider supporting multicarts releases! We hope that other emulators will follow suit. None of those release will work on traditional flash-carts, but individual games may be extracted.

(1)





Mega Mode Super Game 30 (MEGA MODE 슈퍼게임３０) for the Megadrive / Super Gam*Boy... What??

This is indeed a Megadrive cartridge running in Master System compatibility mode, so the ROM is fully Master System code. We don't have proof yet, but there is a possibility that this was also released in a cartridge shell. Because those are kinda neglected/orphan in the preservation world, and they are indeed running SMS code we are published them here! Also see topic about dumping this + extra data.

(2)





Super Game 138 (슈퍼게임１３８) for the Megadrive / Super Gam*Boy + an extra forum topic with technical details.

They are obvious from a same family as the other "Super Game" titles we previously released. Those two releases are mostly the work of Ben Sittler. We have many more things lined up, stay tuned! Enjoy!

If you can help us acquire any Korean title, please reach out!.

Hello,

In 1993, Innovation Tech, an importer and distributor in the USA undertook to publish 5 Korean developed titles as Game Gear games. The titles were advertised as: Cave Dude, Dooley The Dinosaur, Street Battle, Street Hero, and... Wonder Kid! Although the titles were never released, Innovation Tech sent sample cartridges around (possibly to potential retailers and reviewers).

Of those 5 titles, somehow we weren't able to locate a functioning cartridge for Wonder Kid until now. Chris Kohler let me borrow one a few years ago but I couldn't get it to function and dump properly. Several years (and $635) later, I have finally managed to acquire a functioning one! Yeah!






Wonder Kid for the Game Gear (running in SMS mode and using a legacy SG-1000 video mode) is a rather competent clone of the first Wonder Boy game, consider it is actually running under SG-1000 era graphics mode (rather than being an actual SMS/GG era title). It was originally developed by Open Corp., and appears in Australian 1995 release "4 Pak All Action" under the name "Adventure Kid". It is possible and even probably that a standalone Korean release of "Adventure Kid" exists, but we weren't able to locate one.

The game contains a credit sequence and we know it has been made by Lee Sang Hun, Sim Mi Soon, Kwon Dae Youg etc. (see Adventure Kid's credits which appears identical to the one in Wonder Kid).

The game requires MEKA 2025-08-17 (today) release to work on MEKA, and probably doesn't work on most other emulators as of today but we should catch up soon. It uses a simple mapper which is practically close to the Codemasters mapper (single register write to $8000 to map $8000..$bfff regions) except all banks are initialized to 0 on boot, so both $0000..$3fff and $4000..$7fff region always returns the same data. Thanks to Ben Sittler for helping me figure this one out.

The game is also our fifth dump that fully MSX Compatible! You heard it right, the ROM works on an MSX using a "Generic16KB" mapper.

Enjoy !

Cherry on top I have had got two rare Taiwanese SG-1000 variations dumps:

A variant of Championship Lode Runner / Xún bǎo èr dài (尋寶二代) for the Aaronix SG-1000 II which sports a Chinese title screen:


(compare the 3 versions here).

The previously dumped version had a "Lode Runner II" title screen and a miniature chinese logo only in replacement of the Sega bumper screen. As it seems custom with Aaronix releases, many games were later rereleased with Chinese logo.

And a Taiwanese version of Space Armor (Dìguó dà fǎnjí (帝國大反擊) for the Aaronix SG-1000. While our previous two dumps yields a binary which was identical to the Japanese version, a third cartridge variant which I found (white cartridge with a game-custom label) had this new version.



Enjoy!

Our little niche website has now been running for 28 years, starting on 27th March 1997. Every year we celebrate with creativity by running a competition. Here's this year's entries:

* Main competition thread

14 coding/game entries!
* Ants for Master System (SMS)
* Attention to Detail (SMS)
* Eggie Chuck (SMS)
* Gommy Medieval Defender (SMS)
* Iron Man (SMS)
* Jumping Jack'son (SMS)
* Lunar Skirmish (SMS)
* Pac-Man (SMS)
* Star (SMS)
* Tables Have Turned (SMS)
* The Chess Rooks Puzzle (SMS)
* Ultimate Dungeon Escape (SMS) and (SG)
* Yawi (SG)
* Yōkai Ninja (SMS)
(see results)

6 music entries!
* BURNING FORCE (of OPLL) (SMS FM VGM)
* From Here To Nowhere (SMS VGM)
* NGGYU (SMS FM VGM)
* ReSeCom Overworld Theme (SMS VGM)
* Swanky (SMS FM VGM)
* Wonder Boy III OST: Faithful Remakes (arrangement)
(see results)

3 hacks entries!
* Amy Se La Racle (Sonic the Hedgehog hack)
* Loa L'oie (Alex Kidd in Miracle World hack)
* Turma Da Mônica Na Terra Dos Monstros (Wonder Boy in Monster World hack)
(see results)

Enjoy!!!!

Hello!

John Sands, Australian distributor of the Sega SC-3000 released in 1985 the SM1200 MicroModem 3 device (based on the AM7910DC modem chipset by AMD) along with a cartridge titled "SegaCom".

We have obtained the modem along with documents, flyers, many version of the software, including prototypes, a further iteration called AutoCom for an unreleased MicroModem4, and another further iteration called SegaLink which was presumably released as a 3" floppy disk on the Sega SF-7000.





All photos, flyers and manual scans have been published to:
https://www.smspower.org/forums/20407

Huge thanks to Fabio (kamillebidan) for helping sort out the software version. He wrote custom tools to compare each builds so we could order and label them, and generally helped sorting through this in many ways.



SegaCom for the Sega SC-3000, using MicroModem 3.
- 1 prototype build from a prototype cartridge.
- 2 builds that shipped on retail cartridges.



AutoCom for the Sega SC-3000, presumably using MicroModem 4, presumably unreleased.
- 6 prototype builds from prototype cartridges.



SegaLink for the Sega SF-7000
- 1 prototype disk.
- 1 master disk creator disk.
- 1 disk created by us by running the disk creator.

The modem hardware are not emulated as of today. But SegaLink on the SF-7000 may be used through the serial cable. Fabio (kamillebidan) posted a video of it running in his SF-7000 floppy disk emulator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_JUcUkQqGc

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT FILE FORMAT: From now on, Sega SF-7000 dumps will be released using the .dsk file format, using the .sf7.dsk extensions. We previously released files using a .sf7 extension with a fixed 163840 bytes size. Those were "raw" dumps of disks assumed to be formatted using a standard 640 sectors disk layout promoted by the Sega Disk Basic, but the floppy disk controller can technically handle other layouts. My friend Thomas Bernard (Nanard) kindly added support for .dsk format in MEKA in January 2022 and we expect other emulators to follow if they haven't already. forum topic about transitioning to use .sf7.dsk format.

Enjoy!

Merry holidays seasons to those who celebrate or enjoy cozy geeky activities :)

Following our extensive coverage of Taiwanese releases in 2010-2011, partly due to help from Wenli who I visited in Taiwan, I've never stopped researching those games (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7). By now and from searching practically every day and contacting locals I have assembled a 160+ piece collection and still stumbling on new pieces. Those are recently acquired games that were not part of Wenli's collection:






Adventure Island / Màoxiǎn dǎo (冒險島) for the Sega/Aaronix SG-1000 which is MSX1 based and requires the DahJee 2 KB RAM Extension Adapter (or the Jumbo branded equivalent).



Zanac / Yínhé zhēng bà (銀河争覇) for the Sega/Aaronix SG-1000, also MSX1 based and requireing the DahJee 2 KB RAM Extension Adapter.




The Goonies / Qī bǎo qí móu (七寶奇謀) for the Sega/Aaronix SG-1000, also MSX1 based and requiring the 2 KB RAM Extension Adapter. Unlike the two above, this yellow series cartridges has an Aaronix bootup logo. A very charming game by Konami (I enjoy those exploratory screen by screen platformers from the mid 80's).

We have more!



Korean dump of Star Force (스타포스) for the SG-1000. I've dumped two distinct variations of the cartridge and both yield the same dump.

And finally some abnormally "late" release for Game Gear variants:



The US dump for Pete Sampras Tennis for the Game Gear.



And the Japanese V1 dump for (Ayrton Senna's) Super Monaco GP II (アイルトン・セナスーパーモナコＧＰＩＩ) . Somehow only V0 had been released, though an old Japanese blog has a CRC32 for V1. Ben Sittler dumped this first, and made me realize that my own Meisaku copy might have been a swap so I purchased another and realized the Meisaku version matched this new dump. Though it is also certainly possible that some Meisaku releases used the V0 cartridge.

This game notoriously had a main menu that looks flickering and odd on most emulators: it keeps alternating between two images at 60 FPS, relying on Game Gear screen persistence to create a nicer image.

Enjoy!