Magic Engine is an Emulator of the tiny but powerful 8-bit games console, the PC Engine. This was a console created by NEC which, while it wasn’t released in th UK officially, was still fairly popular. It was also popular in the rest of the world so quite a large number of games were/are available. These games can now be played on your PC with this emulator.

Starting the emulator is simply achieved by just double clicking on the PCE.EXE file or typing it in MSDOS. Setting up can be assisted by editing the config file but this is not necessary as it autodetects adequately. It would seem that the emulator needs to be in the same directory as the roms to actually see any games due to a menu which doesn’t include a ‘real’ file requester. Sound cards and CDROMS are detected on startup and within a few second the flashy frontend should appear. All roms detected by the emulator as compatible (it filters out unwanted files) are shown onscreen and can be chosen. Then away you go. Joysticks and keyboard as well as 1-4 player support is also available and redefinable from the emulator as well as a decent frame-skip for slower machines.

Being an 8-bit, I wasn’t expecting much from the graphics and sound. I was absolutely blown away. This console’s games were more like Megadrive/Genesis titles than other 8-bits. Some of the games, like Out Run and Truxton/Tatsujin were better! Sound was six channels of synthesis/sampled sound and was also good, the best of all early consoles apart from perhaps the SNES. Joysticks and keyboard as well as 1-4 player support is also available from the emulator.

As the console’s origin was Japanese you can expect the majority of the games to be arcade conversions and role playing games. Shoot em ups also feature highly not that I.m too gutted by this. Strange games which could only mean anything to the Japanese (As they wrote it!) were also here.

Right, so what do these games play like then. Well, the truthful answer is, perfectly. It is strange that on the PC, to see a sprite-based game with smooth graphics and decent sound you have to emulate a late 80s 8-bit games console! With a decent Vesa 2 extension like Scitech Display Doctor or S3VBE you can achieve perfectly smooth scrolling and sprites. Music also sounds better than generic SB16 music which is strange since that is the soundcard which I was initially used this emulator. Games are fast, playable and damn good fun. I am not sure about the legality of holding these roms but I am using them for the purpose of this review only so I won’t provide any in the download section until this has been clarified.

CDROM games (available still I think) can also be played e.g. Street Fighter. This was a handy addition but I couldn’t test it due to not having any games.

All in all, if you wan’t to play smooth fast games and warped psychedelic role players. Then give this a shot. It’s the dog’s.

9/10 - The games may not be as flashy as now but they sure are fun. And the emulator is practically perfect. Yesiree!