the cutting room mirror

Unlicensed Sega Master System games

Games for the Sega Mark III and Master System that were produced without the permission or knowledge of Sega.

Around the late 1980s, the introduction of the SMS Samsung Gam*Boy (not that one) led numerous South Korean companies to begin manufacturing unlicensed softwares for the Master System. Curiously, a lot of these games run in the backwards-compatibility mode used for SG-1000 games, due to that system's hardware similarities to the MSX. As a result, many of them are ports of MSX games, usually pirate ones, but sometimes also original titles (given the MSX-compatible Zemmix's popularity in South Korea around that time). Later games started to utilize the Master System's native graphics mode for more colorful graphics and smoother scrolling.

(Source: Sega Retro)

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