Blue MSX - Feature Highlights

Feature Highlights

The emulation engine in blueMSX is cycle accurate, which means that the timing and synchronization between emulated hardware components appear the same as on a real MSX. The goal is to replicate each individual component as accurate as possible, which means that the emulator require a more high end PC than emulators optimized for speed.

Most hardware released for the MSX system is emulated and the emulator includes a configuration editor to mimic real MSX systems by choosing components such as floppy drives, memory, sound chips and video chips. Several pre-configured machines are available for users that don't want to build their own machines.

Common emulator features are supported, like screen shots, AVI rendering, and a cheat system. The emulator has a theme based GUI with buttons to control the emulation, a virtual keyboard, and controls to change sound and video settings runtime.

blueMSX is capable of emulating major sound chips including programmable sound generator (AY-3-8910 SN76489) sound chips, Konami SCC, Moonsound (OPL4), FM-PAC (YM2413), MSX-AUDIO (Y8950 sound chip) and a couple of different PCM devices. The volume and pan of each sound chip can be configured in a basic mixer.

blueMSX simulates six different monitor types, from sharp modern monitors to old TV sets. The emulator has controls for real time modification of gamma, brightness, contrast, saturation and color shifting, and it supports horizontal and vertical stretch, as well as a slider for adaptable scanlines on all monitor modes to make the ratio of the video output match a real system. It also supports multiple video sources, for example an external 80 column card.

blueMSX includes a graphical debugger with register windows, memory windows, call stack windows, breakpoints, trace and other features. This makes blueMSX a good development platform for the supported systems.