How to get Mess working?

RetroArch General
#1

Hello, great emulator. I thought I would post this in General because the problem/solution might help others across different platforms.

I run Windows 7 64bit, Intel I5 2500k, nvidia GTX 660, 8 Gb ram, etc… I have the Mess emulator setup and running well in D:\emulators\mess I also run Retroarch, the latest build from the development thread, and most systems run well apart from Mess. I have setup all paths to the Mess directory, and running the Mess core Retroarch sees all the games and systems. But, if I click on a game from, for example, gamex on the Atari 7800, Retroarch just closes without any chance to see what happened. Now, I can click on a system, rather than a game, and that system runs but I can’t do anything from there. In the seperate Mess emulator I can goto the menu at the top and mount/insert a game from there, but in Retroarch I can’t do anything.

Can anyone who has the Mess core running please post a simple guide on how to set this up.

Any help would be most appreciated, thanks.

John.

#2

Sure, http://www.libretro.com/index.php/mamemessume-cores/ It all depends on your romset. If your roms are from the softlist set it should just work.

#3

AndresSM, many thanks for the link. My main Mess roms are from a working 0.152 set, and they work fine in both Mess 0.152 and latest svn. Will now have a good read from your link.

Thanks again.

John.

#4

If your roms are the softlist roms, you need to have the softlists in mess\hash in the system directory

#5

Thanks again, AndresSM. My roms are indeed soft list roms, but still no joy in getting them to work in Retroarch mess. I have the hash folder in Retroarch’s system folder, so I’m wondering are my roms in a folder Retroarch cannot see ?

I use D:\emulators\mess for the mess location, and all mess’ sub-folders are correct. And, like I said, mess itself works great.

Shall I upload my retroarch mess cfg file at some time ? Would that help ?

Again, thanks for your help.

#6

In retroarch you have some specific paths, there is the system path, where you put your bioses, etc. You need to have your hashes there. As in:

\retroarch –| –|—system ------ |—mess ------------|—hash

And your rompath must contain the system you want to emulate, for instance for nestest.zip:

\games –| –|—mess ------ |—nes ------------|—nestest.zip NES has to be the penultimate entry in the path

#7

Thanks again for your help, Andres.

My hash folder is in Retroarch\system I am on my mobile phone at the moment but I will move the hash folder to \system\mess when I get home.

Perhaps I am pointing Retroarch to the wrong folder ? In Retroarch’s menu, paths, when I browse for a games folder Should I point Retroarch to

D:\emulators\mess\roms

Or

D:\emulators\mess

Perhaps this is where I am going wrong. And is the content folder required in Retroarch’s paths ?

Many thanks for your help. John.

#8

The only important path is system, it needs to be in system\mess

#9

Thanks again, AndresSM. Moving the hash folder from system\hash to system\mess\hash did indeed work, but only partially. Cart-based systems work OK, 2600, 5200, coleco, vectrex etc… But some did not such as 7800, and a few others. Same also happened with tape-based systems. Some work, ZX Spectrum, 800 XL. Some not such as c64 which crashed on anything loaded, disc or tape.

Anyway, thanks for your help. I will wait to see if any future updates work better.

#10

it’s not that they don’t work. Some games have more than one media type, or more than one disk/cart, etc. There is no way for those to work from RGUI, you can experiment with the CLI support from core options for those.

Some games, are available with two different media types, I think some FAMICOM games for instance. On those cases you have to load a working game, then go to core options, disable softlist automatic media type and select the media type you want, for instance with SMB2 for FAMICOM it could be flop and cart, select the one you intend to load and then load it.

#11

I will give those suggestions a try, many thanks.