However the Master System was also largely ignored in the United States partly down to Nintendo’s complete dominance of the US retail market and the fact that everyone was playing a game involving a certain plumber from Brooklyn who captured everyone’s attention. European gamer’s were far more receptive to the Sega machine and this was down to the rather good marketing of Virgin Mastertronic who took on the promotion of the system and marketed this as an arcade style machine in the home with lots of excellent posters showing off the colourful graphics of games like Afterburner and Outrun. The Sega Master System enjoyed a good run in Europe and Australia/New Zealand from 1987 up until around 1994, spawning a revision from the original red breeze block which could handle cartridges and PC-Engine style game cards, to a smaller Mark II version which was by far the best-selling version although this did not feature an RGB port or card slot found on the first model.

There were light guns released for the system and some weird 3D glasses and games released for the system too. A handheld version of the machine appeared in about 1990 which many of you may know as the Sega Game Gear and many games were later only released for the Game Gear such was its own popularity. Later on in the machine’s life the Master System became a big hit in Brazil where 8-bit conversions of games continued into the mid to late 90’s. In all there are over 330 games available for the system and a large proportion of these are coin-op conversions from Sega, Capcom and Taito, to franchise games like Alex Kidd, Wonderboy and Phantasy Star which first appeared on the platform. I haven’t mentioned Sonic which of course appeared first on the Sega Megadrive, however I think it is fair to say Sonic can be considered a Master System Icon too as the Sonic games which were released for the Master System platform were really distinctive to the Mega Drive version and were adapted to the less powerful hardware of the Master System to great effect. Sadly for game players in the United States, the first version of Sonic the Hedgehog was also the last official release for the Master System.

So for US-based games players, playing on the Sega Master System, albeit under emulation is a good opportunity to check out many of the later PAL only releases which graced both Europe and Brazil.

Setting up OSMoSE is quite easy once we have downloaded the program from OS4 Depot and saved this to a partition of our choosing.

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