MESS releases are made approximately every month. You can use our subversion repository or automatic SVN builds if you want to stay on the bleeding edge, which may or may not be more stable than the latest release.

0.139 – Released 2010-08-01

Pre-compiled SDLMESS releases for Mac OS X are available at MacMESS.org and mess-universal. Linux binaries may be available from your distribution's package manager under “sdlmess” or at RPM Fusion. Note that all other packages you may come across such as xmess (including xmess.SDL) are no longer maintained and are now years behind SDLMESS.

Note that you need to get the MAME sources as well if you want to compile MESS - to save space, the MESS source is just an overlay that is meant to be extracted on top of the MAME source of the same version, which contains e.g. the makefile. (This is not necessary if you pull from SVN, which includes the MAME source.)

The Windows version of MESS includes a graphical front-end, MESSUI, but if you're using SDLMESS or you just don't like MESSUI for whatever reason, you may want to use one of the third-party front-ends which are available.

• SDLMESS (now integrated into the main distribution)

• xmess (last release 0.106, May 2006)
• AdvanceMESS (GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, DOS, Windows) (last release 0.102, November 2005)
• MacMESS (last release 0.101, October 2005)
• DMESS (DOS) (last release 0.89, November 2004)
• Vectrex M.E.S.S., Intellivision M.E.S.S., Atari Lynx M.E.S.S. (Dreamcast) (last release 0.72, August 2003)
• MESSD (Digita) (last release 0.37b6, August 2000)
• AmigaPPC WarpUP (last release 0.37b2, May 2000)
• Solaris (last release 0.2b4, August 1998)
• RiscOS (last release 0.1, June 1998)
• Amiga PowerUP (last release 0.1, June 1998)

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).

Below is a collection of older MESS releases. Various ports have only been available for a limited number of releases, mostly due to the port developers not having the time to keep up with frequent MAME core changes.

sdlmess0135.zip