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Mess really SUCKS


Romko343

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^Er, actually it does. Here's the message I got in full (keeping in mind this was an attempt at starting up RCA Studio II emulation):

 

84932.ic11 NOT FOUND (tried in studio2 studio2)
84933.ic12 NOT FOUND (tried in studio2 studio2)
85456.ic13 NOT FOUND (tried in studio2 studio2)
85457.ic14 NOT FOUND (tried in studio2 studio2)
ERROR: required files are missing, the system cannot be run.

 

Ah, well my statement still stands, just not applicable to MESS :)

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I think it's extremely cool of mizapf and others to help out and explain just what to do: this business of batch files and the like. I too tried M.E.S.S. a while ago and quickly dismissed it as being a hot mess. Thanks to this thread, I *may* give it another go someday. :)

 

Mizapf has done massive amounts of work to the TI emulation under MESS, picking up where Raphael left off and turning it into a first class emulation, there's no doubt.

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I love all the options in MESS and that it can pretty much do anything.

But the documentation shows it is very hard task to set up the way you want.

 

I have yet to get a configuration that I wanted. But then I was never much of a script monkey.

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MESS TI99/4a emulation is really good but If there's one change I'd like to request it is the ability to use sendkeys() via the gamebase frontend while the emulator is in emulated keyboard mode, for some reason I can only use sendkeys() while the emulator is in natural keyboard mode which is ok for most stuff but for some software this means you end up with a really slow keyboard input delay.

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I was not aware of sendkeys till now, just saw it is a Windows.Forms feature. I cannot say why there are problems with the emulated keyboard. What is the exact problem: no keys at all, or false keys in emulated mode? I could try to ask other devs with Windows background.

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I was not aware of sendkeys till now, just saw it is a Windows.Forms feature. I cannot say why there are problems with the emulated keyboard. What is the exact problem: no keys at all, or false keys in emulated mode? I could try to ask other devs with Windows background.

 

In Emulated mode the keys sent from sendkeys are ignored.

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I remember trying to automate MAME with Quick Test Professional. There was no way to send keypresses to the app. Doing a bit of research, it was found that this was so you could have multiple keyboards. This (IMO) did more harm than good since users were using the same method(sendkeys?) to hook up arcade controllers, such as IPAC, and so forth.

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  • 2 weeks later...

 

- Create a directory for MESS

- Create a subdirectory "roms" in the MESS directory

- Into that path, put the ROMs of the systems you are interested in

- Create a mess.ini by running MESS with -createconfig; modify settings in that file to your preferences

- Run MESS.

 

Linux users actually do not require any frontend, since it is much more comfortable to write a small script file to launch the emulation. For instance, this is my ti99 start script:

 

#!/bin/bash
./mess64 ti99_4ae -keymap -keymap_file keymaps/km_de_LINUX.map -peb:slot3 speech -peb:slot8 hfdc $*

or for the Geneve:

#!/bin/bash
./mess64 geneve -skip_gameinfo -keymap -keymap_file keymaps/km_de_LINUX.map -peb:slot2 horizon \
-peb:slot6 tirs232 -peb:slot8 hfdc -hard1 /home/michael/mess/disks/hd/scsi2.hd $*

Exit the emulation by changing into "Keyboard partial mode" using ScrollLock, then ESC. Also, in partial mode you can open a On-Screen menu with settings.

 

 

 

I usually ignore sentences that start or end with "everybody knows that".

 

Hello, Michael.

 

I see you are using a keyboard mapping file in your script. Is that what is required to get the SGCPU emulation to use the SGCPU keyboard instead if the TI keyboard? If so, can you provide the necessary file for doing so? I can't find any info on how to create that file.

 

Thanks,

 

Gazoo

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No, the keyboard mapping is required for non-US keyboards to avoid dead keys.

 

In fact, the SGCPU is falsely emulated as having a TI keyboard. I have it on my todo list for almost two years now, but lots of things with higher priority also made it on the list in the meantime. Next thing will be the HFDC rewrite for the modern floppy system, and after that I guess there's indeed time for the SGCPU. :-)

 

What I would recommend is to use the natural keyboard (-natural).

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No, the keyboard mapping is required for non-US keyboards to avoid dead keys.

 

In fact, the SGCPU is falsely emulated as having a TI keyboard. I have it on my todo list for almost two years now, but lots of things with higher priority also made it on the list in the meantime. Next thing will be the HFDC rewrite for the modern floppy system, and after that I guess there's indeed time for the SGCPU. :-)

 

What I would recommend is to use the natural keyboard (-natural).

 

Thank you!

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I have a question... I have been playing* around on my TouchPad with various packages and programs, including attempting to compile various things with various success. (Various varieties vary.) Any thoughts on getting MESS working on the TouchPad? Apparently, and I have not yet confirmed this for myself, there is a Debian environment which runs on the TouchPad. There is an X server already available.

 

I also have ACL for WebOS, which puts an Android 2.3.6 environment on top of WebOS, which is enough to run a vast expanse of Android applications, including a Commodore 64 emulator. What about MESS on Android?

 

* Well, I say "playing," but this is actually in part related to my class homework, including nmap, nping, trying to get aircrack working, using scapy, and the dosfstools.

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With the ubiquity of today's smart phones and tablets I can certainly understand that there is some interest to get MAME or MESS running on those platforms. Many people keep saying that the PC is already dying, but I wonder whether those people indeed do their job on a tablet, including text processing, creating presentations, video work and so on. I surely don't, and I appreciate my 24" monitor and Cherry keyboard.

 

MAME and MESS are not designed for performance, that's a major trouble for older PCs and these other devices, also including these micro-systems like the Raspberry Pi, Arduino boards, Beagle Bone etc.

 

When performance is an issue, there may be some point in the design where you have to concede that you cannot get any deeper with the emulation but have to stay on a certain abstract level. As much as I have learned from the project objectives, this is not the intended direction. It is a problem to claim to build an emulation that is as precise as possible but only to a degree that allows it to run on weaker platforms.

 

I would guess the current release requires a PC power of at least a high-end P4 or a Dual core machine; it does not smoothly run on PCs older than about 10 years. On my current Core i7 64 bit the TI emulation of MESS causes about 35% CPU load, running on one core (the 9995 systems, i.e. Geneve and TI-99/8, need a bit more). Maybe later someone will find out how to make better use of parallelism; this would certainly boost performance.

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There are some areas of productivity which can be done on a tablet alone, but not for long periods of time, IMNSHO and in my observations. I have seen some pretty damn good audio and graphics apps on iPad and Android, the design of which definitely lend themselves to touch-screen operation.

 

But you simply will not replace the laptop or desktop with a real keyboard and mouse with a tablet any time soon without reliable and useful alternatives. Now, a good keyboard dock or wireless device is a major step forward -- as much as I despise Windows 8.x on the desktop, on a Surface Pro with a keyboard and mouse it works very well for productivity (so long as you stay away from the Modern UI as much as possible.) Add onto that the ability to connect to a larger screen, and voila.

 

There are some usability constraints to confront in porting MESS/MAME to something like a tablet or phone where touch is the primary input option. There are some emulators In the Touch Pad world which handle this fairly well: 2600 Emu, NES Emu, and MD Emu (to name a few.) Of course, these are just game systems without using a keyboard as one would with TI emulation. Though I expect that for TI emulation purposes you would already have a keyboard of some sort for your device.

 

Just some thoughts. (As an aside, I was able to get aircrack-ng compiled last night, tough the Touch Pad wraps the wireless device in what appears to be a generic Ethernet device so there seems to be no direct access to the wireless hardware, and hence no direct access to 802.11 frames.)

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MAME and MESS are not designed for performance, that's a major trouble for older PCs and these other devices, also including these micro-systems like the Raspberry Pi, Arduino boards, Beagle Bone etc.

 

 

On the other hand, Mame4Droid can certainly handle relatively powerfull systems (e.g. NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat, ...) on my Ouya, so the situation might not be so bad either.

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On the other hand, Mame4Droid can certainly handle relatively powerfull systems (e.g. NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat, ...) on my Ouya, so the situation might not be so bad either.

 

Do you know what version Android that requires?

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I think it really depends on the emulated system. We certainly did not intentionally implement a brake or so ... In principle, if the emulation remains on a higher level, the performance could be enough. As soon as we apply some deeper emulation detail (e.g. subcycle emulation of the CPU) we may cross the line where performance becomes vital

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I think it really depends on the emulated system. We certainly did not intentionally implement a brake or so ... In principle, if the emulation remains on a higher level, the performance could be enough. As soon as we apply some deeper emulation detail (e.g. subcycle emulation of the CPU) we may cross the line where performance becomes vital

Yeah, I figured as much. For what it's worth, the TI and Geneve emulations run predictably at 100% on my 2012 lowest-end Mac Mini (I believe it has a 2.5 Ghz dual core i5). Of course, that's still a long ways off from a 1.5ghz quad core Android device, but still...

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Not sure. As I said, I use it on my Ouya, and that's based on version 4.something. Why not simply give it a go? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.seleuco.mame4all

 

I will give it a shot after work and before homework tonight.

 

Yeah, I figured as much. For what it's worth, the TI and Geneve emulations run predictably at 100% on my 2012 lowest-end Mac Mini (I believe it has a 2.5 Ghz dual core i5). Of course, that's still a long ways off from a 1.5ghz quad core Android device, but still...

 

And my dual-core 1.8GHz ARM TouchPad.

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