Getting MESS-related games to work at all

RetroArch General
#1

Hi all

I can see that people are geting mess/ume/mame console games working, but I’ve been trying for a LONG time and not getting anywhere. I actually want to make a retroarch config for my frontend and do a fair amount of useful coding against this - and this is a major blocker to everything i’m trying to do.

I can see people getting things working, like the CD-I driver in the post below this: http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4888

But I’ve tried everytihng to the letter on SO MANY builds of windows retroarch, my console returns me back to a prompt with no info whatever I do (even if i run in debug). Or if I run the UI it just crashes/disappears…

I’m concerned that none of the posters who got stuff working say what version of MAME/UME/MESS they are running - the hash xml format changed a little when Mame incorporated MESS/UME (sometime in 2015) and the drivers in retroarch all say 2014. However, I HAVE tried with the HASH and ROMS folders from a (known good) 2014 version of Mess as well as the 2016 versions from MAME (many many times!) and I can’t get anything running (from the MESS project, any (2016 or 2014 MAME-arcade roms run fine by the way,no problems there). I’ve tried merged and split sets, 7z, zipped and unzipped filesets, tried having my roms and hash folders in all of UME, MAME amnd MESS folders in system, tried all combinations of having ROMS inside the Root of System or in subfolders of MAME, MESS, UME. There are a LOT of potential variables here, but I think i’ve convered all possible options and not one successful game load!

We need something to focus on to resolve this - so like the walkthroughhere, I would like to get super mario brothers working on NES, and I am trying to use the very latest nes softlist, nes bio rom and smb zip from the mame project. I place the hash folder in system/hash., I place a zip of the nes bios in the system folder, then i’ve tried various things to point to SMB in the ui or command ine, for instance: P:\Retroarch\RetroArch\retroarch.exe nes -rompath “F:\MAME\Software List ROMs es\smb.zip” -L “P:\Retroarch\RetroArch\cores\mess2014_libretro.dll” (the forum here adds spaces in odd places so please ignore the space you see before this in “dll”) and many others…nothing works as I say I went back to the hash, roms and softlist rom (zip format) from 2014 to try and match the retroarch driver, but multiple configs of that didn’t work either.

Ideally, you can give me a command line and a required folder list (with urls or at least versions for the content in the source folders) that works for you to make the latest retroarch on windows load the latest mame rom of super mario on nes in zip format. Or you can tell mehow to debug so I can work out what’s going on…

#2

done. Its MAME you want as the core (rather than anything which is post-fixed 2014, that’s before all the changes). This is currently a Retroarch core for MAME 0.170, which is 7 releases after the MESS/MAME merge, so setting up those MESS system roms in the MAME folder under system, and having the HASH folder in the same level, works fine.

Having said that, because MAME and MESS have merged, the MESS roms are now collected and distributed in the same folder as the MAME roms, yet as Retroarch considers the MESS roms ‘drivers’ (that must be in the system folder), but considers the MAME roms as ‘games’ (which can be ‘run’ with the MAME driver), there is still a problem - where are you gonna put all your MAME roms (particularly if you use MAME outside of Retroarch as well) or how are you going to separate the MESS ones to put just those, or links to just those, in Retroarche’s system/mame folder?.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the Hash folder must be in a subfolder of System/MAME (which it isn’t for MAME itself, i.e.: you can’t cleanly symlink you MAME, Roms folder). You could just remember to always copy MAME’s HASH directory to a subfolder of your MAME ROMS folder and then symlink, but I think a programmatic solution might be cleaner as that diverges from the MAME folder structure and you have to then always remember to do that just for Retroarch everytime you change anything with MAME…

#3

Thanks for your investigation. Remember that https://github.com/libretro/mame is open-source software. You can submit a pull request on github to fix the consideration of MESS roms as “drivers” and the “Hash” folder location problem. If you can’t write that code, open an issue ticket for each issue in the Github project and others will see it.