Bringing the old SEGA games to life

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Rotate e60 screen ninety degrees. Load up master gear, and it's like a game gear all over again.

I've tried this emulator a few days ago and while all the games i tried worked fine, i had problems with the sound on my E61 (firmware v2). I could hear and recognize the sound (in sonic for example) but it was pretty bad. It's difficult to describe. It was not cutting out but it sounded like the sound was mixed with some random noise. This problem appeared with all the games i tried.

Am i the only encountering this problem?

Hmm... the audio I had on my (old firmware) E61 sounded fine, definitely no random noise. Try Castle Of Illusion for the SMS, if you hear any random noise on that then there might be a problem to do with the 2.0 firmware. You might also want to try the Game Gear version of Sonic, that has slightly different/better music (I've a feeling the GG had better audio hardware).

The real life Master System had pretty poor sound though. Could it be that you're mixing up the GG or Mega Drive versions of the Sonic tune with the SMS one?

Incidentally, one emulator author I emailed while writing the emulator list article said sound was the hardest thing to emulate on S60 3rd Edition. He said sound was handled differently to previous S60 editions and was quite tricky to get right.

I just tried this on my 3250, (I tried Sensible Soccer for SMS).

Without an 8 way d-pad or the ability to use 2+8 at the same time while using the "button B" it didn't really work. Also the 3250 "Joystick" was not able to do 8 way either.

Sadly when I tried to quit the emulator (admitidly part way through a game) it restarted the phone.

Having come from an N-Gage it was quite difficult to control on a candybar style form factor.

I also found the sound pretty poor, but then I can't remember much about the original SMS sounds except Sonic that was very blocky and overly loud.

"Without an 8 way d-pad or the ability to use 2+8 at the same time while using the "button B" it didn't really work."

"Having come from an N-Gage it was quite difficult to control on a candybar style form factor."

I don't know what games you tried, but before doing the review I spent a weekend with several popular titles such as Sonic, Castle Of Illusion, Phantasy Star, Columns etc and it worked fine for me on all of them, I had no problems with the controls at all.

I found the games very playable, and I came from an N-Gage too. I also had a Game Gear when it first came out and this emu seemed fairly close to the original gameplay, I was able to make the same jumps and take the same shortcuts that I did 15 years ago. The memories came flooding back. 😊

However, this might be caused by the E61 being physically much wider than the 3250, it's almost laid out like the original Game Boy or the GBA SP. There's quite a lot of phone to wrap your hands round on the E61 so it's comfortable to have one hand controlling the joystick and the other operating the two buttons. I could imagine this being less comfortable on a narrower phone and I possibly should have tested it on one before writing the review, I'll try and bear that in mind for next time. On the other hand, I don't suppose there's much that an emu software author can do about the layout of the phone the emu runs on.

"Sadly when I tried to quit the emulator (admitidly part way through a game) it restarted the phone."

I never had that happen at all on my E61, and I used it for several days on the trot, leaving games running, receiving calls midway through games, using other apps at the same time as the emu etc.

Unfortunately what works on one model might cause problems on another, even if they're theoretically meant to be the same. Maybe you could try updating your 3250's firmware? The 3250 has just been added to Nokia's online do-it-yourself update service so you can do it at home.

"I also found the sound pretty poor, but then I can't remember much about the original SMS sounds except Sonic that was very blocky and overly loud."

Well this is the problem, 8-bit consoles did sound very poor in 1985 when the SMS was invented, so it's hard to know what's the original's fault and what's the emu's fault.

The volume can be adjusted from the emu's main menu if that's a problem.

Try the GG games through the emu, they have better sound as that system dates from 1991 and as far as I can tell the sound on them is true to the original. If you compare the GG Sonic to the SMS Sonic for example, you'll hear the difference.

I've tried Castle of illusion for MS and Sonic for GG and still have the same sound issue. As i said, it's difficult to describe. It's not cutting, it's not really stuttering, the sound is just very dirty. I haven't played with a Game Gear for at least 10 years, so i don't remember how it sounded but that really sounds too bad for me, i don't think it was that bad.

I've tried to download MasterGear for Windows to see if the sound was any better with the same ROMs on Windows but couldn't find any trial version for Windows on the Web Site. Does anybody knows where i could find one?

Well as it seems we hear different things and/or have different opinions about how good the sound is, the best advice I could give to anyone reading this thread is to download the free demo and try it for yourself! 😊

I've played some games for a little while longer yesterday evening and i'm now starting to wonder if i'm not just expecting too much from a SMS game. If i listen to the sound closely, i can hear that the melody plays just fine. It's the percussions that pose problem: they sound like white noise. Shhh, shhh instead of bang, bang... you know. Quite annoying in Sonic for example because there's shhhh, shhhh all the time.

When i was a kid, i had a Game Boy so that's what i know best. I only played SMS and GG at some friends places. On the GameBoy, the percussions were played perfectly (as far as a game boy game soundtrack's perfection goes of course :rolleyes😊. Zelda Game Boy for example had a fantastic soundtrack with all kind of percussions. So maybe the SMS and GG's sound was reallly just worse.

The Game Boy came out in 1989 but the original Master System came out in 1985, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a difference in the sound hardware.

I normally play games with the music off anyway, no matter how good the sound quality I find constantly playing tunes fairly annoying... 😊 I think that's part of the reason why games like Tomb Raider did so well, they only played music during exciting bits and stayed silent the rest of the time so it seemed more atmospheric.

But like I said above, anyone curious about this emulator should try the demo themselves, it's the best way of finding out what it's like.