ColeccoVision emu on MESS? How good/bad is it?

[S1500]

A few weeks ago, I thought I would try to play some CV games in MESS. Set up all the appropriate file paths & such, but rotten luck. I swear less than half the games actually worked. This was with the latest version of MESS. Any idea? The CV bios file checked out alright.

 

Should I just give up & try ColEm yet? I would prefer a one size fits all emulator, than 20-30 single-console emulators of varying quality.

[newcoleco]

A few weeks ago, I thought I would try to play some CV games in MESS. Set up all the appropriate file paths & such, but rotten luck. I swear less than half the games actually worked. This was with the latest version of MESS. Any idea? The CV bios file checked out alright.

 

Should I just give up & try ColEm yet? I would prefer a one size fits all emulator, than 20-30 single-console emulators of varying quality.

Based on my personal experience, the most compatible emulator is named AdamEm, an emulator for DOS made 10 years ago and can even handle games for the roller controller and steering wheel, but can't play digital sounds like in Sewer Sam. BlueMSX is a pretty good emultor too, but I've found two problems : digital sound is slightly too fast and a game like SteamRoller doesn't work on it for unknow reason. ColEm is pretty popular but not the best for sound and graphic support, specially for my games. I hope that answers your question.

[Bruce Tomlin]

MESS is well named because it is a total mess. I use a version of MacSDLmess in my build scripts to test my code (because I can call it up from a command line), but that's really it. I know there's a bug with the VDP interrupt handling which can potentially cause a game to lock up when it wouldn't on real hardware. But since I only use it for development, I don't know if any real games are affected. (I blame Coleco anyhow for putting it on NMI, which has some rather annoying side-effects.)

[+Trebor]

MESS runs every ColecoVision ROM I have without issue. It is my emulator of choice for the ColecoVision. Outside of the current problem of not being able to map controller hat inputs or the Num Pad for Player movements (Problem started after version 0.130 See here... http://bugzilla.mess.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1833 , everything else works fine.

 

You may have some bad or incorrectly dumped ROMs in your collection. MESS is more particular when it comes to what ROMs it will run.

 

Nonetheless, Meka... http://www.smspower.org/meka/ is also a good ColecoVision Emulator as is FreezeSMS... http://freezesms.emuunlim.com/ .

 

-Trebor

[newcoleco]

About MESS, as far as I know, do not gives the right noise generator emulation. I did a video months ago about comparing noise emulation, and unfortunately MESS didn't emulate well noise for Colecovision emulation.