The WonderSwan Color was the successor of Bandai WonderSwan. Being manufactured by Bandai, it features a lot of titles based on Japanese anime and manga. It was also supported by Square, with ports of classic titles like “Final Fantasy” and “Front Mission”.

WonderSwan Color in MESS requires a cart dump in .ws, .wsc or bin format to work. To run it, you can use the “cartridge” (cart) device, e.g. from command line

mess wscolor -cart "C:\pathtogame\gamename.wsc"

A list of WonderSwan Color software can be found here.

WonderSwan Color emulation in MESS still has imperfect sound.

The WonderSwan Color is a handheld game console designed by Bandai. It was released in 2000 and had a moderate success.

The main feature of the WonderSwan Color, compared to the original WonderSwan, is of course the color LCD screen. In fact, the new system was also slightly larger and heavier than his predecessor, and features 64k of RAM. On the other hand, no substantial change has been done to the internal hardware, making the WonderSwan Color fully compatible with the original WonderSwan library of games.

Prior to WonderSwan's release, Nintendo had virtually a monopoly in the Japanese videogame handheld market. Thanks to its low price, Bandai's handheld was able to cut its own position in the market.

Another reason for the WonderSwan's success in Japan was the fact that Bandai managed to get a deal with Squaresoft to port over the first “Final Fantasy” games, previously released on Famicom in the 1980s, with improved graphics and controls. Together with the large number of Bandai's games based on popular manga and anime brands, this helped to sell a lot of units.

However, with the success of the Game Boy Advance and new agreements between Squaresoft and Nintendo, the WonderSwan Color and its successor, the SwanCrystal, quickly lost their advantage.

The SwanCrystal was the third version of Bandai's WonderSwan handheld game console, succeeding the WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color. It was released November 2002.

It is essentially the same as the WonderSwan Color, except that it uses a TFT LCD, superior in response time to the LCD technology used previously: this helped the visualization of the game on the screen and reduces the ghosting effect.

On the other hand, since the internal hardware is basically unmodified, the Bandai SwanCrystal is compatible with games for both the WonderSwan Color and the original WonderSwan.

The SwanCrystal was available in four case colors: Skeleton Blue, Skeleton Black, Blue Violet and Red Wine.

(info based on Wikipedia)

• WonderSwan_Color
• Swan_Crystal

• Oswan
• Cygne
• Mednafen
• Xe
• WSCamp [no link]