Open-source S3-MSX-PC turns ESP32-S3 into an MSX2+ emulator
An ESP32-S3 board is now doing VGA, USB keyboard, and stereo audio as a bare-metal MSX2+ machine. The parts bill is low enough to make the trick feel real.
The ESP32-S3 has crossed from neat microcontroller stunt into something that looks uncomfortably close to a tiny retro computer. Ivan Svarkovsky’s open-source S3-MSX-PC boots MSX, MSX2, and MSX2+ bare-metal, drives a real VGA monitor, takes a USB keyboard, and outputs stereo PDM audio without an external video chip or an I2S codec. On paper, that is a lot of 1980s machine for a board that can be built around an ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8 with 16 MB of flash and 8 MB of PSRAM.
Svarkovsky is refreshingly blunt about the project’s origin. He says he is not a professional programmer and built S3-MSX-PC as a hobby effort while using an ESP32-S3 development board to learn the platform quickly. He also says he never owned an MSX himself, but did play on a Daewoo MSX clone as a child. On the ESP32 Forum, he said he had been building the emulator for several months, which makes the result feel less like a lab demo and more like a stubborn weekend project that got out of hand in the best possible way.
The hardware list is where this turns from clever into practical. The suggested build uses 400-ohm and 800-ohm resistors for the VGA R-2R ladder, RC parts for audio filtering, and simple VGA and USB-A connectors. Svarkovsky puts the cost at under $2 in passives, plus about $4 to $12 for the board itself. The implementation targets 640×480 at 60 Hz through the ESP32-S3 LCD_CAM peripheral, generates 64 colors from six GPIO pins, and pre-shifts the palette during initialization so it does not waste time on runtime bit manipulation. USB keyboard input is described as plug-and-play, with latency around 2 to 4 ms.
That matters because MSX2+ was never a global standard. The MSX format was announced on June 16, 1983, built around Zilog Z80-compatible 8-bit hardware, and MSX2+ machines first launched in Japan on October 21, 1988 with models including the Panasonic FS-A1WX, Panasonic FS-A1FX, and Sony HB-F1XDJ. GitHub shows S3-MSX-PC as a public fork of ducalex/retro-go, created only hours before the coverage and already a few commits ahead of upstream while still thousands of commits behind its history. The result is still a hobbyist build, but it is the rare kind that feels like the start of a usable DIY MSX2+ platform rather than just another bare-metal curiosity.
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