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Game · Consoles, homebrew & emulation

openMSX

Emulate all aspects of the MSX with high accuracy.

  • Completely free
  • Windows and Linux
  • Open source

Overview

openMSX is a console and retro computer emulator, available on Windows and Linux.

Overview written by LicitPro from the documentation published by the authors and the cited sources; we have not tried the resource ourselves.

Excerpts that establish this information
  • “The MSX emulator that aims for perfection.” — Winget, 10 November 2026

At a glance

All of openMSX is free: no feature is locked behind a paid plan, and its code is open.

Its licence (GPL-2.0) is a copyleft open source licence: you may use, study, modify and redistribute it, including commercially; modified versions must keep the same licence.

Strengths

  • Open source code
  • Commercial use allowed

About

openMSX is an emulator for the MSX home computer system. MSX was a standard for Z80-based home computers, and was a (largely) Japanese attempt to establish a single standard in home computing similar to VHS in video. The MSX standard was designed by ASCII Corporation in Japan, in cooperation with Microsoft Japan. The later of which provided the extended BASIC for the machine. In addition to emulating MSX, MSX2, MSX2+, MSX Turbo R and many of it's peripherals, openMSX also supports emulating the ColecoVision and Sega SG-1000 game consoles and the SpectraVideo SVI-318 and SVI-328 home computer systems. Note: by default the openMSX emulator only ships with the C-BIOS open-source BIOS implementation. This BIOS is restricted to cartridge based MSX games. For a full MSX or SVI emulation it is necessary to provide your own MSX and/or SVI BIOS ROMs, which must be placed in the ~/.openMSX/share/systemroms directory.

Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

Sources and checks

  • Facts collected from Winget (Windows Package Manager) (source code, publisher, platforms, version) —
  • Facts collected from Flathub (credit card, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, commercial use, version) —
  • Last technical check: 7 November 2026
  • Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

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