Razing Core brings a finished shoot ’em up to the Sega Master System

Developer BadComputer0 has released Razing Core, a complete vertically scrolling shooter for the SMS, built with the devkitSMS toolchain and sold as a $8 digital download.

AI-drafted from 2 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

A new, finished game has landed for a console that stopped getting new games from Sega decades ago. Razing Core is a vertically scrolling shoot ’em up for the Sega Master System and its Japanese sibling, the Mark III, made by a developer working under the name BadComputer0. It is out now as a digital download, and a boxed physical edition is planned for 2027.

According to RetroRGB’s report, the game was built using devkitSMS, a homebrew toolchain for the console written by sverx, with music from Polaria Poyon of Lovepenguin. The digital release costs $8 on itch.io and comes with a printable PDF manual, the kind of detail that matters to people who like their homebrew to feel like a proper release rather than a ROM file with a readme.

From alpha demo to full release

Razing Core did not appear from nowhere. The RetroRGB piece notes that an alpha demo had already done the rounds, and the images from that build (dated 2025 and credited to Bad Computer) show the same title screen style and enemy designs that carry through to the finished game: a glowing multicoloured core sprite, a starfield backdrop, and the kind of dense bullet patterns familiar from Japanese-style vertical shooters. The RetroRGB writer, who says they bought the finished game after having played the earlier demo, describes it as feeling like an upgrade across the board, calling it worth the asking price for anyone who likes the system.

A short synopsis surfaced in a separate listing gives the plot in brief: a deep-space mission aboard a ship called the Horizon runs into an unknown object, the Core, and things go wrong from there. It is a familiar shoot ’em up setup, spaceship meets ominous artefact, but the point of a game like this has never really been the plot.

Why the FPGA note matters

The more practically interesting detail is aimed at people running the game on FPGA-based hardware rather than an original console. FPGA (field programmable gate array) devices like the MiSTer recreate console hardware in reconfigurable logic rather than emulating it in software, and they are popular with collectors who want cycle-accurate behaviour without hunting down ageing original chips. The itch.io page reportedly warns that players using an FPGA device may need to disable the system BIOS for the game to run properly. The RetroRGB writer tested this on a MiSTer and says it worked fine both with the BIOS disabled and set to “internal”, adding that the option is easy to find in the on-screen display and is likely disabled by default anyway. It is a small compatibility footnote, but it is the kind of thing that saves someone an evening of head-scratching when a cartridge, real or virtual, refuses to boot.

What is still unclear

Beyond that, there is not much hard detail circulating yet. Neither of the reports gives a file size, exact release date beyond “now”, or technical specifics on what devkitSMS features the game leans on, such as sprite limits or scrolling tricks specific to the Master System’s VDP. There is also no confirmation yet of pricing or contents for the 2027 physical edition, only that one is planned. For a console with a small but persistent homebrew scene, though, a complete, paid, manual-included release like this is unusual enough to be worth flagging on its own, whatever else remains to be pinned down.

Sources

Image: RetroRGB -

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