X68000 - Mess Tutorial

[Lordmonkus]

The menu bar ? Are you talking about the drive icons on the left in Mess ?

I think there is a way to enable scroll lock on with a command line parameter but I couldn't get it working, I also didn't spend a lot of time working on it however.

[Zombeaver]

No, there's like an actual menu at the top which I can disable if I click to disable it but it always comes back after starting again.

[Lordmonkus]

Ahh, not sure about MessUI since I just use the command line version.

[Zombeaver]

I figured it out. It's in the mame.ini as 

# WINDOWS VIDEO OPTIONS
#
menu                      1

changing it to 0 makes it stay hidden.

[Lordmonkus]

Cool, im working on finding a solution to the scroll lock but no luck yet.

[Zombeaver]

It's not a huge deal but it seems like generally I'd be much more likely to be making use of it being on than off.

I seem to be having problems converting over my MAME HLSL so that's what I'm working on.

[Lordmonkus]

I don't think there is a way to turn on partial emulated keyboard through the ini or command line which kinda sucks cause I would prefer it to be on by default as well.

HLSL settings should transfer over just copy and paste the appropriate sections of the ini files into the mess.ini and the \ini\presets\raster.ini files.

[Zombeaver]

Alright, finally got it working with standalone MESS thanks to your tips. It turns out it didn't like my old bloom.fx file for whatever reason. The screen is completely black if I use it. All of my other old hlsl .fx files seem to work though.

[Lordmonkus]

Cool.

[Zombeaver]

I figured out how to have the partial UI mode on by default!

It's in mess.ini in this section

#
# CORE INPUT OPTIONS
#

ui_active                 0

Change the 0 to a 1.

[Lordmonkus]

Ahh nice.

[Zombeaver]

So I was able to successfully get a 3-disk game to work. The game I experimented with was Aquales.

It occurred to me that an actual x68k only has 2 disk drives so nothing should require more than that in order to simply get a game to boot and start properly. I tried just using -flop1 %romfile% -flop2 "[path\to\disk2].dim" but that didn't work. So then I thought "Maybe one of these is actually a save disk or something - let me try a different one" so I then tried -flop1 %romfile% -flop2 "[path\to\disk3].dim" And...it worked! So then I tried -flop1 %romfile% -flop2 "[path\to\disk3].dim"  -flop3 "[path\to\disk2].dim" and that also worked. Whether or not it'll actually access that third disk when needed (for whatever it's needed for) I'm not sure - worst case scenario you could always select it when prompted via the MESS file selector and insert it into floppy drive 2. It does show all disks inserted in the selector though.

x68000 -flop1 %romfile% -flop2 "X:\Emulation\X68k\Roms\Aquales\Aquales (1991)(Exact)(Disk 3 of 3).dim" -flop3 "X:\Emulation\X68k\Roms\Aquales\Aquales (1991)(Exact)(Disk 2 of 3).dim"

I'm not sure if the weird disk order thing is some kind of common convention for this platform that I'm just not aware of or if it's just a fluke in this case, but if something doesn't work in the normal order, this would indicate that you might need to try a different order and seeing what'll boot.

I've got some other games that are over 2 disks that I'm going to test out as well.

 

[Lordmonkus]

Interesting find.

[Zombeaver]

So I was a little bit off here because it turns out there was an opening sequence that I was missing. It's kinda weird because it'll basically load either the game or the opening depending on the combination of disks you're using - 2 + 3 for the opening and 1 + 3 for the game.

What I ended up doing is creating an additional app for the opening and using the normal launcher as the game.

The normal launcher is directed to disk 1.dim and then with additional parameters of x68000 -flop1 %romfile% -flop2 "X:\Emulation\X68k\Roms\Aquales\Aquales (1991)(Exact)(Disk 3 of 3).dim"

Then add in an additional app directed to mess64.exe with command line parameters of x68000 -flop1 "X:\Emulation\X68k\Roms\Aquales\Aquales (1991)(Exact)(Disk 2 of 3).dim" -flop2 "X:\Emulation\X68k\Roms\Aquales\Aquales (1991)(Exact)(Disk 3 of 3).dim" and titling it "Opening"

I got Phalanx working and in its case Disk 3 by itself is the opening and 1 + 2 are the game. In this case, because the opening is just from one disk, I can just tell it to "Use emulator" in the additional app and direct it to the opening disk.

[Lordmonkus]

Oh dear. LOL.

[Zombeaver]

Yeah...

[Cebion]

Now I'm trying to run XM6 Pro-68k with Munt

I'm even out of luck getting my Soundcanvas VA SC55 working. Its listed and connects but no can do yet..

@Zombeaver do you have Steam so we can chat?

[Zombeaver]

I do, yeah: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Zombeav

I never had any luck getting Munt to work with XM6 Pro-68k  The Munt monitor actually shows that XM6 is connecting to it when it's started, but it seems like it's not getting any actual input from the emulator.

I use Munt for tons of stuff in DOSBox and it's great for MT-32 emulation there.

[Cebion]

4 minutes ago, Zombeaver said:

I do, yeah: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Zombeav

I never had any luck getting Munt to work with XM6 Pro-68k  The Munt monitor actually shows that XM6 is connecting to it when it's started, but it seems like it's not getting any actual input from the emulator.

I use Munt for tons of stuff in DOSBox and it's great for MT-32 emulation there.

Alright I added you. 

So you're one of them crazy sound fanatics like me

I have 4 Dosbox Version on my Desktop one for GUS, SC-55, MT-32 and "normal" sb 16 sound

To the XM6 Pro68k how did you get into a menu where you could select the Midi device? All my games autoboot into the games.

[Zombeaver]

It actually depends on the game - I remember seeing a chart somewhere that mentioned how to enable it from one game to the next. It's kinda weird - in some games it's like a "secret" option that requires holding down multiple buttons at once when you're on a specific screen... all kinds of weird stuff. I mostly just tried it with Akumajō Dracula aka Castlevania Chronicles though. Once you enable MT-32 through XM6 Pro-68k itself (it's in the sound settings) the game actually prompts you to select which sound device you want to use before it starts (if you don't have MT-32 enabled in the emulator, it just boots into the game).