In recent years, our friends over at the Sega8bit.com Forum have been organising meetups in Manchester (UK), where people play (mostly) Master System games, trade, chat and generally have a bit of retro fun. There's also a competition - with a real trophy - to add a frisson of additional excitement to the proceedings. Oh, and it's in a pub, so there's food and drinks if you like those sorts of things.

Many of the regulars there are also regulars here, and I've been a few times myself (I'm even the current trophy holder, somehow). If you can make it to Manchester for a Saturday afternoon this August 10th, you are welcome to join in.

(There's no sport on that Saturday, by the way. Except maybe some Olympic Gold, California Games, Pro Wrestling, etc...)

The best place to discuss it is over at the official thread at the Sega8bit.com Forum, where you can post to say you're coming. This year I'm organising the competition - and excluding the games I'm good at - so there's some discussion to do for that, too.

SMS Power! was founded (with the name SMS Camp) just over 16 years ago. That makes me feel old... In those years we have been collecting and publishing information about Sega 8-bit happiness and awesomeness, making our little corner of the Internet better as time goes by.

One part of that is to continue creating things, and that's why we have competitions every year, and this year is no exception. If you visit the Competitions forum you will find Sonic music played on a church organ, prog rock Donald Duck music, a new video player for the Master System, the world's first homebrew Light Phaser game, and much more.

We would like you to enjoy all of the entries, post comments on what you think of them - both good and bad feedback is welcome - and next we'll start voting on them to decide which we like the best. Good luck to all the entrants and thanks to them for the brilliant creations! It's SMS Power's birthday but we all get the presents!

Hello all !

Our 16th anniversary and competition day are fast approaching. There's still time for you to come up with a music or coding submission, however humble it is there's a lot to learn from putting something together.

We've got 3 dumps releases today to keep others patient for the release of competition entries.

The Nemesis saga continues with the ultimate cosmic adventure...



Let's get started with the main course. After releasing Gradius last year, we've got a dump of the even rarer Nemesis 2 / Gradius 2 (그라디우 ２) for the Master System / Samsung Gam*Boy. Released by Zemina in 1987, this version is also based on the original MSX1 classic.

For some reason the game always run in "Penguin mode" which was originally unlocked by plugging a Pengun Adventure cartridge in the second cartridge slot of a MSX. This could be an intentional modification that Zemina made, or perhaps a side-effect of the game reading unexpected data and interpreting it as Penguin Adventure. I'm sure people will find a way to re-enable the original Metalion ship.



We've also got a Prototype of Cutthroat Island for the Game Gear, the brilliantly implemented fighting game by Software Creations, released in 1995.



Finally we've got the US release of Scratch Golf for the Game Gear. Until now only the Japanese dump was available.

I am still in the process of completing a full redump pass of the Game Gear library and could do with some help with the rare games. If you have complete collection of the US and European libraries and willing to lend some cartridges for dumping, please contact me.

We will be holding our annual coding and music competitions again this year, in time for our upcoming 2⁴th anniversary on 27th March. Every year people complain that they ran out of time or didn't realise it was happening, so maybe you should start working on your entry now?

CJ Elephant Fugitive for Game Gear, an elusive platformer published by Codemasters. This game took a long time to reach the internet and is also latest licensed Game Gear that wasn't dumped and released so far!
Modder extraordinaire Ichigobankai helped to get this dump done. Thank you :)

It's been a month since the last batch of releases, and I've come back with another little pearl this time - the recent streak of luck following NBA JAM, Street Hero and Korean rarities continues!



I've managed to acquire a prototype cart of Unreleased Game Gear game Crazy Faces. The game has been discussed before but no prototype had surfaced - until now! Crazy Faces was developed by The Kremlin in 1993 (same developers as SMS/GG versions of Desert Strike and Prince of Persia among others). It is an original variation on sliding puzzle games where you have to push around blocks to assemble a picture. The pictures here are based on Domark properties - and Sonic!

The prototype we managed to get hold of doesn't come with music but otherwise looks pretty solid and fun. It is unsure whether the game development ever reached completion or why it was canned.

Enjoy another treasure from SMS Power!

Voting is finished, we have checked for postal ballot fraud, cut off any hanging chads, fired all the corrupt officials we could find, and now we have results!

Coding Competition

We had several very strong entries this year, exciting looks at early versions of big projects, as well as a few entries more in the old-fashioned spirit of our competitions, where releasing anything is a huge achievement. So congratulations to everyone who managed to enter!

Results:

1. DARC by Zipper: 8.29
2. Lost Raider by vingazole and ichigobankai: 7.83
3. Tower of Sokoban by Killer Bean 2 and BG: 6.82
4. DataStorm by haroldoop: 5.15
5. Derpy's Mail by aypok: 4.94
6. Radical Rat SMS by TmEE: 4.90

We're looking forward to seeing the excpected further developments on most of these!

Music competition

This year we got a bunch of great entries, perhaps a little heavy on covers but when the quality is this high, there's nothing to complain about! Here are the results of the vote:

1. Sonic Chaos - FINAL GEAR ZONE by Chris_Kelly: 7.73
2. Little Red Riding Jumpsuit by tibone: 7.42
3. Collision Chaos - Sega CD (JP/EU) (SMS/GG rendition) by Chris_Kelly: 7.38
4. Smash TV - C64 (Insert Disk Theme) by Chris_Kelly: 7.00
5. Green Hills Zone OPLL by ValleyBell: 6.67
6. Final Battle with Endocrine by Chris_Kelly: 6.31
7. My The Last Dungeon by furanku: 6.14
8. Space Harrier: Main Theme by thehendrix: 5.15
9. SMStrk Real Time Demo by TmEE: 3.36

Prizes

We raised an amazing $500 competition fund this year, thanks to many generous contributions from our members. We'll be announcing prizes when we figure out what they will be :) Discussion will accompany this news post.