I've Conquered MESS - MESS Default Command Line Compendium!

[retrogamer]

commandline just stresses me out. im a lazy ui guy. the frontend makes me go oh yeah its not the eighties again when i really sucked at games and lost my ass in quarters! arcades and bars can thank me.

[orac31]

thank you just got neo-geo-cd to work

[Lordmonkus]

So here it is after 4am and of course I have to tinker with stuff and like last night around this same time I decided let's have another go around with Mess (my arch nemesis of emulators). This is an emulator I so desperately want to love but for one reason or another it just doesn't seem to want to be the emulator for me. Progress has been made however, small but progress none the less. Last nights goal was to get the Atari 5200 working since this is a system that really has no great options. Sure there are some serviceable options such as Kat5200 but it's still rather meh with it's funky UI, the way you kick out of game and the way it forces all my background windows to my second monitor. Well my goal of getting the 5200 emulated with Mess was a success and even better I was able to transfer over my HLSL settings from Mame and they actually look really good with the 5200 games. I can safely say now that Mess is my new Atari 5200 emulator of choice. Tonight's adventure took me to the Sega Saturn, another system where the choices of emulator are all far from perfect with SSF being the best but with the major drawback of mounting disk images or having actual game disks to put into your cd drive. There was some success in that I was able to get it working and loaded up Darius Gaiden (my go to testing game). Game looked great with my HLSL settings. Some very minor sound glitches but overall a very enjoyable experience. Problems did come up however when trying out Guardian Heroes which had some speed issues but playable. My next game to test was Nights which works really well in SSF but sadly is very broken using Mess. One last and final major problem is the control configuration using an Xbox 360 controller. There was no option to set up an analog stick for Nights, or at least I couldn't see any option and there is the option for it for the 5200. Also button bindings would not allow for using the L and R analog triggers for the L and R buttons of the Saturn controller. My final verdict on Saturn emulated through Mess is that while it is better over all than Yabause and Retroarch's Yabause core it is not a replacement for SSF yet. I am hopeful however since Mess / Mame is such a heavily developed emulator, we should see progress made eventually

[orac31]

lordmonkus said So here it is after 4am and of course I have to tinker with stuff and like last night around this same time I decided let's have another go around with Mess (my arch nemesis of emulators). This is an emulator I so desperately want to love but for one reason or another it just doesn't seem to want to be the emulator for me. Progress has been made however, small but progress none the less. Last nights goal was to get the Atari 5200 working since this is a system that really has no great options. Sure there are some serviceable options such as Kat5200 but it's still rather meh with it's funky UI, the way you kick out of game and the way it forces all my background windows to my second monitor. Well my goal of getting the 5200 emulated with Mess was a success and even better I was able to transfer over my HLSL settings from Mame and they actually look really good with the 5200 games. I can safely say now that Mess is my new Atari 5200 emulator of choice. Tonight's adventure took me to the Sega Saturn, another system where the choices of emulator are all far from perfect with SSF being the best but with the major drawback of mounting disk images or having actual game disks to put into your cd drive. There was some success in that I was able to get it working and loaded up Darius Gaiden (my go to testing game). Game looked great with my HLSL settings. Some very minor sound glitches but overall a very enjoyable experience. Problems did come up however when trying out Guardian Heroes which had some speed issues but playable. My next game to test was Nights which works really well in SSF but sadly is very broken using Mess. One last and final major problem is the control configuration using an Xbox 360 controller. There was no option to set up an analog stick for Nights, or at least I couldn't see any option and there is the option for it for the 5200. Also button bindings would not allow for using the L and R analog triggers for the L and R buttons of the Saturn controller. My final verdict on Saturn emulated through Mess is that while it is better over all than Yabause and Retroarch's Yabause core it is not a replacement for SSF yet. I am hopeful however since Mess / Mame is such a heavily developed emulator, we should see progress made eventually

Any Idear of the command line for Atari 5200 please?

[Imgema]

lordmonkus said I can safely say now that Mess is my new Atari 5200 emulator of choice.

Do both action buttons work? Mess had always this problem for me with the Atari 5200. Only 1 button works, even if you set up the controls, the second button doesn't work. Try a game that uses both buttons. Like Moon Patrol. Either the jump or fire will work but not both. That's why i'm stuck with Kat5200 atm.

[DOS76]

I woke up and read this post and did some testing and yes I have both buttons working. I'm using MAME 174 though it was easy to setup it seems that as long as you have the bios files you can just add the platform under MAME using the same command line that Brad illustrated. Then add a directory path to your games in MAMEUI and launch I found a few things tricky as for Beamrider you have to start the game by using number keys for options and by default button 1 is set to do two functions and at first does neither. I mapped the number keys to my d-pad, R analog stick, shoulder buttons and triggers then I could start the game. I tested with this game specifically because I know it uses two separate buttons.

[Belgarath]

DOS76 said I woke up and read this post and did some testing and yes I have both buttons working. I'm using MAME 174 though it was easy to setup it seems that as long as you have the bios files you can just add the platform under MAME using the same command line that Brad illustrated. Then add a directory path to your games in MAMEUI and launch I found a few things tricky as for Beamrider you have to start the game by using number keys for options and by default button 1 is set to do two functions and at first does neither. I mapped the number keys to my d-pad, R analog stick, shoulder buttons and triggers then I could start the game. I tested with this game specifically because I know it uses two separate buttons.

Hmm you're right it does recognise both fire buttons for Beamrider..However it doesn't work for Moon Patrol and this is a problem that's been going on for a long time, could you try Moon Patrol and see if it works for you?

[DOS76]

No good in Moon Patrol I'm guessing the second button should allow to jump over that stupid crater that wipes you out very annoyingly over and over. I'm down in my basement now using a PC that uses MESS and not a newer version of MAME. So if you only need to use KAT for one game your still doing OK unless that is like your all time favorite 5200 game.

[Belgarath]

Yeh the 2nd button is for jump, but it's not the only 5200 game I remember having problems with the 2nd button in MESS/MAME, as I recall it never worked for H.E.R.O. either where it's used for the dynamite. There's probably a few others as well I just can't recall at the moment, although you'd think if it works for one game it would work for all of them seeing as we're still emulating the same machine..

[DOS76]

The crazy part is that they list 5200 as 100% I think in MAME but I can't see how if you can't use all the buttons in some of the games sounds like an issue to me.

[Belgarath]

Well I just tried H.E.R.O. and that works fine (MAME 0.175) but zero joy with Moon Patrol.. I'll wait and see what other games Imgema had problems with before further testing.

[Imgema]

Belgarath said Well I just tried H.E.R.O. and that works fine (MAME 0.175) but zero joy with Moon Patrol.. I'll wait and see what other games Imgema had problems with before further testing.

I only tried 4 games. Moon Patrol loads but the jump button doesn't work. H.E.R.O works fine and the controls also work. Kangaroo and Joust don't even load for me. So i abandoned MESS for this system and went with Kat5200. I even tried the MESS core in RetroArch and it has the same problems with the regular one. Keep in mind though that the last version i have is 0.161, before the merge with MAME. I also noticed something interesting with HERO and Moon Patrol. When i load HERO, it goes straight in game. When i load Moon Patrol i get a bios screen first then it asks me to press some keyboard keys to select how many players, etc. I wonder if it emulates ADAM instead of the 5200 console when i load Mon Patrol. That would explain why the controls work with one game and not with the other.

[nmc]

Thank you Brad!

[Lordmonkus]

Hmm after reading some of the responses and further testing yeah certain games like Moon Patrol the jump button does not work for me either. Hero and Kangaroo work just fine while Joust and Star Wars just go to a black screen after the initial splash screen. Pitfall loads but the start button does not work while Pitfall 2 works perfectly. I tried a handful of other games with varying degrees of success, some work while others have either funky controls or just don't work. I am using the 174 version of Mess Brad linked to. I tired to use my Mame 174 but I had no luck getting it to work, I will try again later.

[Imgema]

So it seems like MESS emulation of the 5200 is far from 100%, isn't it?

[Lordmonkus]

Maybe, maybe not. It could just be a case of setting up the controls better for games that have control problems. As for the non loading games they could just be rom dumps that Mess does not like.

[DOS76]

In MAMEUI I went to my directory and added a second location pointing to my Atari 5200 ROMs then I went into LaunchBox and under MAME I added Atari 5200 as an associated platform then added a5200 -cart -skip_gameinfo -now and I have it up and running. To do this without creating a 2nd directory path just make a folder in your ROMs folder and name it a5200 then place your 5200 games there.

[Lordmonkus]

Added the 5200 roms folder to my rom paths and that got it working, thanks DOS. Jump button still doesn't work in Moon Patrol however :(

[Belgarath]

lordmonkus said Maybe, maybe not. It could just be a case of setting up the controls better for games that have control problems. As for the non loading games they could just be rom dumps that Mess does not like.

There's not much to configure control wise though..and 2nd button should be 2nd button regardless of what game is being ran. Moon Patrol just won't jump...and I mapped and then tried all the possible buttons with no luck. The crc of the rom I'm using also matches the one in MAME's a5200.xml Also for me at least, in MAME the tops of the mountains in the background scroll slower then the rest of the background, they keep getting cut off which definitely isn't meant to happen.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah there really isn't a whole lot to configure. I just meant it more in terms of I haven't really spent any real time at looking at everything yet and maybe there could be something off. The 5200 is a system I didn't own or even play ever so my knowledge on the system is extremely limited so I have no clue how certain games are supposed to look and play.