MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - What's the trick with Mess?

> Hello, can anybody please tell me what's the deal with Mess? I have been a Mame guy
> for a lonnng time but can't figure out how to work the mess thing. I put SNES and NES
> and N64 roms in my cabinet but can't figure out what to do with Mame or Mess? There
> must be something that I'm missing? Is it built into Mame now and if so where, what
> and how? Thanks.... Steve

MESS doesn't exist anymore, all of the drivers that were supported by MESS have since been rolled into MAME. So now MESS and MAME are one and the same.

To run SNES games, you'll need snes.zip, since the console had some dumpable ROMs that are necessary to emulate the baseline system. Know how you need neogeo.zip to run Neo-Geo arcade games in MAME? Exactly the same thing. For the NES, you shouldn't need a BIOS, and for the N64, I think I can safely advise you as the person who's put the most work into the driver that you're better off using a standalone Nintendo 64 emulator.

Once you have snes.zip and any other of the expected ROM sets (again, just treat 'em like any normal BIOS set in MAME), you have two options: Software lists, or -cart.

Software lists are more analogous to the existing ROM sets supported by MAME, as they are identified by a "short name" (similar to how 'puckman' is the short name for 'Puck-Man', and 'mspacman' is the short name for 'Ms. Pac-Man') and can comprise multiple separate files in a single ZIP. In that case, you specify the software list entry as a second parameter in addition to the normal machine parameter that you supply.

So, to run Mega Man 3 (US), rather than typing:

mame puckman

You would type:

mame nes megaman3u

However, much like MAME will typically not start a game if ROM files are missing when starting a coin-op game, it applies similarly strict rules to the naming and checksums of the individual files in a softlist entry. If it doesn't match what MAME expects, it will either print out an error and exit, or it will run after printing out a warning, exactly as it does with normal coin-op games.

If you'd prefer to be able to just throw a .nes or .smc or whatever file at MAME, then the better choice is to use the "-cart" option.

Suppose, for example, that I had a cartridge entitled "Mega Man 3 (US).nes" inside a subdirectory called "software" that exists in the same directory as the MAME executable. In this case, to run the game, I would type this:

mame nes -cart "software/Mega Man 3 (US).nes"

At which point MAME should start up as expected with that particular game running.

Finally, to the rest of you on these forums who think that I'm unjustifiably harsh to people asking questions, make a note of this post in your calendars, because it's something that I'm loath to repeat: I don't have a problem with people asking questions politely who've obviously done their homework in advance, I just have a problem with people asking questions who are rude, ignorant, or who otherwise seem to give the impression that they think their time is more valuable than everyone elses'. So anyone who isn't kaptainsteve can shove it up their own ass - I helped him not to prove a point, but because his post was well-written, concise, gave all of the necessary information to answer his questions, and he generally didn't come across as even a fraction of the self-entitled asshole that some of you people do.