One morning in July 2014, I was sitting in the train on my way to work and thought it would be interesting to try and program an 8-bit game for the SMS using Z80 assembly (the things you think about during a sleepy commute..). After doing some searching, I realized there were no hardware based systems to run my attempts on. It may be possible to burn some EPROMs and put them on a cartridge, and then run them on a real SMS, or using some other “solution”, but these seemed like ugly hacks. Of course, emulators can also be used, but somehow I don’t get the same feeling of running something on an emulator vs. running it on real hardware connected to an old school CRT television. That’s when I decided that I needed to create my own SMS, and the Mini System was born. I designed and built it from scratch, although I still haven’t started on that game that started it all.

Niek van Suchtelen