This article presents a new magnetic equivalent circuit (MEC) for a real-time emulation of a 16/10 segmented-rotor switched reluctance motor (SSRM) based on the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) configuration. The proposed real-time MEC contains the reluctances of slot leakage, air gap, and iron core of the SSRM. To speed up the emulation, a ten-by-ten matrix system is developed for the MEC. A new algorithm is proposed to solve the matrix system to reduce the computation time. To carry out the experiment, the HIL is employed in this article. It can provide a precise and real-time condition for the application of the new method. In the test bench, the field-programmable gate array provides an operating platform to realize the real-time emulation of the MEC model. As verified, the proposed real-time MEC model benefits the real-time emulation and the performance evaluation of the SSRM. The proposed method can be applied to other switched reluctance motors as an efficient way to verify their real-time characteristics with high accuracy and low emulation cost.