Welcome to the official wiki for MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), the sister project of MAME¹⁾. MESS is an open source 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 0.136, MESS supports 439 unique systems with 1,161 total system variations and is growing all the time. 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).

Below, you can find some documents about MESS and its usage.

• MESS User's Manual
• MESS FAQs
• sysinfo.dat, i.e. miscellaneous info about systems emulated by MESS.
• Compiling MESS
• Output of -showusage command
• Contents of mess.ini with comments and descriptions.
• debugger -help output (debugger commands and their usage)
• How To's
  • SDLMAME/SDLMESS on a framebuffer device.
  • creating CHD from a CD for use in MESS drivers, courtesy of The Guru.
• Unofficial MESS TI-99 emulation pages at ninerpedia

• How To's
  • Setup Eclipse for MESS.
  • Adding a skeleton driver to MESS.
  • The MESS driver lifecycle.
• Description of MAME and MESS source layout
• MAME Reference

  cpunum_set_input_line()

  cpunum_set_input_line_and_vector()

  cpunum_set_input_line_vector()

  cpunum_set_irq_callback()

  logerror()

  mame_rand()

  popmessage()

• MESS Reference

  SYSTEM_CONFIG

  device_getinfo

• How MAME Works at the MAME DevWiki

• How To's
  • Upload screenshots to the Wiki.

• MESS drivers - with systems, open bugs, BIOS & device info, emulation status and much more!
• sysinfo.dat, i.e. miscellaneous info about systems emulated by MESS.
• Emulated systems (in progress)

MESS maintains a Subversion repository at svn://messdev.fdns.net/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.

• chdman
• castool
• imgtool

• mame_regtest
  • testing
  • config
  • results

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:

• Dumping Project Overview
• Systems that need to be acquired and dumped.
• Systems and games that have been acquired and need to be dumped.
• Systems that need drivers and ROMs are known to be available for.
• Systems that are in MESS that have no, bad or partial dumps.
• Games that need to be acquired and dumped.

Some MESS contributers have set up personal user pages on this Wiki, where you can find infos about their activities, their collections, WIPs and other stuff.

• Christopher Stone
• Curt Coder
• Duke
• incog
• mahlemiut
• Michael Zapf
• Wilbert Pol

• etabeta's playground
• inblog
• Micko's WIP
• MooglyGuy's N64 Blog