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NeoGeo CD w/ Mess Tutorial


Lordmonkus

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Since the topic of NeoGeo CD emulation has come up twice in the last 2 days I figured I would write up a tutorial on how I got it up and running. I got it up and running on 2 emulators, Mess and the stand alone version of Final Burn Alpha. The FBA emulation quality seemed to be just fine but the lack of fast forward functionality which is something you really will want with NeoGeo CD. The NeoGeo CD was notoriously slow being a 1x speed cd drive. NeoRaine apparently emulates this system as well but I do not like Raine so I didn't try to get it working there.

Anyways, enough of the rambling lets get started on this.

For starters I am using Mess version 0.174 for this and the bios files I have work with this. For obvious reasons I cannot supply the bios or tell you directly where to get them but I will tell you that a google search for "mess bios" should yield results in the first couple of hits. The FBA neocd bios come in the big FBA roms pack but do not work in Mess. There are 2 zip files you will need:
neocd.zip
neocdz.zip

In these files you will see:
front-sp1.bin
top-sp1.bin
neocd.bin
000-lo.lo

Put these 2 zip files in the /roms folder in your Mess folder
/Mess/roms

Now open your mess.ini file and add your rom location folder to the rompath. Below is what I have in mine.
rompath                   "H:\Emulation\Roms\NeoGeo CD\"

If there is no mess.ini file then open up your command prompt window and go to your mess install folder where the mess64.exe is located and type the following command:
mess64.exe -cc

This will generate a mess.ini file in that folder.

Now add Mess as an emulator to Launchbox like any other emulator and in the "Edit Emulator" window, "Associated Platforms" tab, "Default Command-Line Parameters" add the command switch "neocdz -cdrm" to your NeoGeo CD platform. Image below.

Disk images that work for me are in cue + bin. Some downloaded images I noticed were in cue + iso + mp3 / wav which on their own didn't work but after converting the audio and mounting the image in daemon tools lite and regenerating a cue + bin with ImgBurn they worked fine. I only tried a couple of games since there is very few games for it that weren't released on MVS / AES like Crossed Swords 2 I didn't go out of my way to get more games to try out.

Once you are up and running pressing the tab key in game will bring up the menu where you can set up all your controls and settings. Mess also supports GLSL and HLSL shaders so if you have settings from Mame you like they are relatively easily ported over.

Here is an EmuCR link to a 0.176 version of Mess which I have tested and does work.
http://www.emucr.com/2016/08/mess-git-20160821.html

 

neocd.jpg

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It's a bit of a weird story but yeah basically now Mess and Mame are merged back into a single program but because it is open source people still make separate version of the program. In the main post above I have a link to an EmuCR page with a version of Mess I have tested this guide with and it works just fine. Scroll to the bottom of the page pick 32 or 64 bit based on your operating system, that will give you a bunch of link options. Pick one that suits you, I use the mega link personally.

Mess to me is a bit simpler to get set up for these oddball systems that are not arcade. You could do this stuff all through Mame if you wanted to but there is extra folder structure work involved. Also I like to keep things separate, Mame for arcade and Mess for oddball systems that have no real alternative emulator.

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  • 2 weeks later...

That's up to you.

Personally I wouldn't bother with a full set. There are maybe 3 or 4 exclusive games like Crossed Swords 2 and a yet to be english translated Samurai Shodown RPG. Other than that though a few games did have some minor changes.

Here is a web page with a list of games and differences.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/neogeocd/916662-neo-geo-cd/faqs/51773

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  • 4 weeks later...

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