BrMSX

Logo of BrMSX.

BrMSX is an MSX emulator for DOS, written by Ricardo Bittencourt. It was first released in 1997, and at the time it was regarded as the fastest, and most accurate MSX emulator. Currently the emulator is discontinued.

History

Back in 1997, MSX emulation was still preliminary. The only emulators available were fMSX and CJS MSX. At the time, neither was very accurate, nor they were fast enough to run all MSX software at full speed, in the PC computers of that era.

BrMSX aimed to solve these two goals. In order to improve accuracy, the Z80 core was tested using ZEXALL, emulating every aspect of the CPU, down to the undocumented flags. Fast emulation was achieved by coding the emulator entirely in Assembly, and by using a number of hacks, the most successful being a dirty rectangles implementation known as the video cache.

The implementation of BrMSX started in September of 1997, and the first public release was in November of the same year. The name itself, BrMSX has a double meaning. The Br in the name is an allusion to Brazil, the country where it was coded, but the characters also are the initials of the author, Ricardo Bittencourt. The logo, created by Raul Tabajara, reflects both the MSX imagery (by using a font similar to the logo of the MSX game Aleste) and the Brazilian flag (by using the round shield with the Brazilian sky). The mouse icon used in the GUI was a rendition of the keyboard of Expert (one of the Brazilian MSX models).

A number of features now common in MSX emulation were first seen in BrMSX:

Z80 core fully compliant with ZEXALL
Support to MegaRAM
Support to samples generated by the PSG, PPI, and Konami Majutsushi
MSX2+ cross-lines animation
Disk drive emulation through I/O ports
Dir as Disk, mount directories in the host machine
ADVRAM, a hardware prototype that was never released commercially
Interactive debugger
Multiplayer games (using a serial cable)
Fast forward button, to skip game introductions
Save states
TV emulation (blur filters and scanlines)
Green monitor emulation
Emulation of the LEDs (Caps Lock, Kana and the Disk Drive)

BrMSX sources were released in open source license in 2000. Eventually, interest in BrMSX faded, as fewer and fewer people used DOS-compatible systems. The latest released version was 2.6, in May of 2000.

External links

[The latest version of BrMSX, hosted in Zophar's Domain]

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