Welcome to the official wiki for MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), the sister project of MAME1). MESS is a source-available project which documents the hardware for a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles, and calculators through software emulation, as MAME does for arcade games. As a nice side effect to this documentation, MESS allows software and games for these hardware platforms to be run on modern PCs.
The goal of this wiki is to document how to use MESS, the technical architecture of MESS, and the systems emulated by MESS. If you want to help, register a user name and look at the pages already in the Wiki to get an idea how things are currently laid out here.
As of version 0.145u3, MESS supports 632 unique systems with 1,668 total system variations and is growing all the time (you can find a complete list of the supported systems here). However, not all of the systems in MESS are functional: check the specific driver pages to know the emulation status of your favorite machine in MESS.
If you have any questions or would like to contribute to MESS or the Wiki, feel free to join us in the IRC-Channel #messdev on EFnet. Or at the MESS forum.
Current source code and binaries for MESS can be found on the downloads page. Previous versions are available as well.
Artwork files for use with MESS can be downloaded at the MESS Artwork Project. Collections of cheat files for use with some systems emulated by MESS can be downloaded at Pugsy's cheat page (cheats for ColecoVision, Genesis and Game Boy Advance currently available).
For completeness of information, you can also use MESS-Info.dat, which lists, for all systems and drivers, any changes present in “whatsnew” and SVN.
Below, you can find some documents about MESS and its usage.
MESS maintains a Subversion repository at svn://messdev.no-ip.org/mess where you can follow the development. If you want to contribute and help with coding, there is a general ToDo list on the Wiki.
The tools needed to compile MESS can be downloaded from the Build tools page. There is also an automatically updated page which lists current compile issues.
The goal of this project is to identify, acquire and dump the systems needed for emulation. The project strives to preserve all game consoles, handheld and computers (basically anything not found in an arcade). The MESS Dumping project parallels the work of the MAME Dumping Project. The project has a couple of different sub-pages:
Some MESS contributors have set up personal user pages on this Wiki, where you can find info about their activities, their collections, WIPs and other stuff.