MAMEWorld Forums - News - ProjectMESS: Where no MESS website has gone before

ProjectMESS makes today a very big step in the way towards being the #1 web-resource for MESS!

As you can see from the homepage or from this link, a whole new section of the website has been opened, featuring MAWS-like pages for each system emulated in MESS (be it a computer, a console, a calculator, a chess machine or a TV decoder).
In each page you can found the technical details about the system, you can see a brief summary of media devices, bios options and RAM options (if any) which are supported in MESS for that specific system. And if the system supports a software list, you can easily jump to the pages for the games of that list!
Moreover, the pages contain images of the machines (mostly thanks to the picture packs by AntoPISA) and all the info from sysinfo.dat, including instructions on how to mount disks, tapes and other software on the emulated system (support for MESSinfo is planned but not ready yet, be patient).

A last feature, one that I'm particularly proud of, is the expansion slot handling. In recent versions of MESS, indeed, some home computers (e.g. C64 and AT386) have been added support for dynamical expansions, so that you can decide at running time how many disk drives, or HDs, or soundcards to connect to the emulated system, and which models you want among the supported ones.
ProjectMESS now allows you to try each combination of options (from the drop-down menus in the Tech Info section for these systems) and see which additional hardware and options result from each configuration.
In my opinion, this feature can be of great help when you want to know which options to use from command line: depending on the chosen expansions, indeed, emulated machines can have no floppy options or can have a dozen of them (e.g. if you connect a sufficient number of Commodore drives through their serial ports), and it is quite difficult to keep track of the additional options which become available in each case.
By using the pages of projectMESS, on the other hand, it is a lot simpler to find out how you can connect e.g. 5 floppy drives and 2 IDE hard disks to a C64 through its IEEE48 expansion, or how you can have three different screens attached to a Macintosh IIx through its NuBus expansions (even if you must be warned that the scripts still give not 100% correct options if you e.g. connect multiple devices in series, and then you remove the first device without removing the remaining ones...)

Have fun!