Flatpak for openMSX

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.

Installation

This Flatpak is available on Flathub. After following the Flatpak setup guide, you can install it by entering the following command in a terminal:

flatpak install flathub org.openmsx.openMSX -y

Once the Flatpak is installed, there will be an icon to launch openMSX which you can simply start using your desktop environment's application launcher.

Or alternatively by typing:

flatpak run org.openmsx.openMSX in a terminal to run openMSX

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.

Updating

This Flatpak follows the latest stable openMSX version. To update it, run the following command in a terminal:

flatpak update

Limitations

• For security reasons, this Flatpak is sandboxed and only has access to the user's Home folder. You should place any files you need within openMSX in that folder (or in a subfolder). You can optionally further restrict or widen access using flatseal.

Please create an issue if you find any other limitations specific to flatpak that should be documented here.

For general assistance with openMSX, visit openmsx.org.

Configuration files

openMSX does not follow the freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory Specification.

User config files will be created under ~/.openMSX after first launch. To access it with a graphical file manager, you may have to make hidden folders visible.

Building from source

Install Git, follow the flatpak-builder setup guide then enter the following commands in a terminal:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/flathub/org.openmsx.openMSX.git
cd org.openmsx.openMSX
flatpak install --user flathub org.freedesktop.Sdk//24.08 -y
flatpak-builder --force-clean --install --user -y builddir org.openmsx.openMSX.yaml

If all goes well, the Flatpak will be installed after building. You can then run it using your desktop environment's application launcher.

You can speed up incremental builds by installing ccache and specifying --ccache in the flatpak-builder command line (before builddir).