Mahlemiut's MESS page

Wow, been a while since I last posted something here… :)

Anyway, I spent this past weekend setting up a basic expansion port interface for the good old Amstrad CPC. Of course, it's not much use without any expansion devices to attach to it. :) So, I also created a couple of simple expansion devices to use it with – the Amstrad SSA-1 and DK'Tronics speech synthesisers.

Both devices are based around the SP0256-AL2 speech chip, and thusly, will require a dump of its internal ROM, which should be added to cpc464.zip. It is not required if you do not use either synthesiser, however, the synthesiser devices will load the ROM if the device is being used.

To enable use of a synth, just add -exp ssa1 for the SSA-1, or -exp dkspeech for the DK'Tronics, to the commandline. Then it's just a matter of loading the software that supports the relevant speech synthesiser, as you would on a real CPC. There are, however, some issues with a few pieces of software where they fail to detect the SSA-1 correctly, but I can confirm that Glen Hoddle Soccer, Tubaruba, and Darkwurlde do work in MESS with the SSA-1 enabled. Here's a video example.

It's been quite a while since I last posted anything here. During this time, there has been steady progress on the FM-Towns MESS driver. In other words, there are a few games that are somewhat playable. So here is a quick look at what is working (or close enough to working).

Since MAME's i386 CPU core is somewhat lacking in features, the first two games to run were those that ran in real mode.

After some bugfixes to the i386 core, some more life is shown.

You can also run TownsOS 2.1, and some TownsOS applications.

Still bashing away at the MESS FM Towns driver. I've now added some of the all-important CD audio functionality to the CD-ROM controller. Not an easily task, when no games run, and there is virtually zero documentation on it (that I could find, at least). But, since MS-DOS does now run, there's always a possibility of some small, simple DOS application that can play CD audio tracks. Here's one! :)

So, what I did, was download the exe, and copy it to a normal PC MSDOS disk image via WinImage. Then boot DOS 6.2 in Unz (since MESS only supports the normal, for Japan, 1.2MB 1024 byte sector format currently), and copy the exe to the DOS 6.2 floppy. This boots in MESS, and CDPLAY.EXE can be run there.

If you're having trouble imagining how it sounds from a screenshot, there's footage from an actual FM Towns Marty, running Raiden Trad – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gziChneci4

Been looking back at the Fujitsu FM-Towns driver lately, and been successful to some extent in getting it to do something useful. Now it passes the RAM test successfully, and managed to stop it from returning to an empty code area. Now it fails on checking the CD-ROM drive. Oh, and there's basic video output also now, so you can actually see just what it's testing. Still a very long way to go on this one, but progress is progress.

Been following Kale's progress with the Sharp X1 driver lately, and came across another emulator than runs on the X68000. Not only that, but this emulator was originally released back in 1993(!), and updated early 1994. I guess back then, no one thought to give it a cool name, so they stuck with “X1 Emulator for X68000”. Also, it's written in 68k ASM, so it's much faster than XM7 is. That is, it does run at a sluggish pace on a 10MHz X68000, but it does appear to run most software. Had to test this in MESS also, and it appears to work very well. Disk images do tend to quickly fill up a 40MB SASI harddisk though. :)

And it's still faster than MAME running NAOMI games on today's PCs. ;)