MESS vs the dedicated Emulators - what's better

[IMBerzerk]

For the longest time, I have used MESS to emulator Atari, Colecovision, NES, SNES, and many other super old systems. I find it to be easy to use and accurate. What differences do you guys see when you use the more dedicated emulators for each system. For instance take Stella vs MESS or Znes vs MESS... what is better, and why?

IMBerzerk

[we1dont7die]

I was wondering the same thing actually. I have always used the dedicated emulators for genesis and snes but have grown to like mames interface. any downfalls emulating these systems with mess? is cheating easier like mame?

[Ninja Rygar]

It depends on the system of course, and requires lots of trial and error.

Mess's emulation of the Atari 2600 always bothered me. Graphically... it's way off... it's too dark, the screen is too small, and messing with the options doesn't seem to help at all. I suppose it's because Atari 2600 emulation is very difficult, it not only has to emulate the system, but also the tv. So Mess's "Let's try to be like Mame" policy isn't going to work for the 2600.

Stella, PCAtari, and Z26 all have much nicer emulation for the Atari 2600, but each have their own flaws... and Mess outshines them in some departments.

First up, PCAtari. The biggest problem is, you can't use the windows version with GameEx. At all. It's set up to be it's own frontend, with a rom selector and everything. Jeez, why do so many emulators do that? It's pointless... let me just open whatever rom I want... but anyway, the DOS version can be used for GameEx, but it's terribly outdated and difficult to use. On the other hand, PCAtari has one of the weirdest controller mapping options I've ever seen. I hated it at first but once you get used to it, it's not bad. One final note, you can't use .a26 files with PCAtari... which is what most Atari games are. They have to be in either .bin or .pal... a simple renaming actually works so... what's the deal?

Anyway screw PCAtari, next up is Z26 which is my emulator of choice. Pain in the ass to use because unlike PCAtari, Z26 is PURE command line. There are so many command line options and none of them are self-explanitory.. they're all just single letters. However, this type of customization makes things real nice for GameEx. Everything works nice, the only problem is the controller configuration... you have to set the type of controller that is plugged in, into the command line, which for the 2600, that means there are paddles, driving controlers, keypads, thumbgrips, light guns and god knows what else. It can't just do them all like MESS can. Which is a shame because there is no way for GameeX to change the commandline depending on what game you used... so all the other controller options won't work in GameEx. I've also found that while playing Z26 with music running... the music and all other sound becomes ruined. Probably just me.

Stella is probably the best emulator, which is the popular opinion. It autodetects wether it's PAL or NTSC, uses all controllers (I think) and just runs really well. I hate it's rom launcher but, whatever. For me, it doesnt' work, but that's only because my computer is a piece of shit. Stella can't configure controllers as well as MESS or PCAtari though... if I remember correctly.

So for the Atari 2600, the order of best to worst probably works like this... Stella, Z26, MESS, PCAtari,.... Anything else.

I'll chime in later with some of my other system tests.

[IMBerzerk]

For me, it has a lot to do with, let's call it "ease of configuration". I found MESS to easiset and fastest to set-up in Game-Ex with the easiest options to make changes to the controller config. I had Stella, which was very good, but not as easy as MESS, and the rest, forget it. Z26 drove me nuts and PCAtari (DOS) was impossible.

The minimal for a dedicated emulator should be to be able to set the key-mapping to whatever you want it to be. If I don't see that, off it goes.

I think CC64 is the best emulator for that. You can remap the whole keyboard and every controller you want to emulate.

Keep it up, I hope this will be a very informative thread for anyone looking to make choices on emulation. Over the 9 years that I've owned my MAME/Emulator cabinet, the most difficult part was all the time wasted testing the individual emulators to try and find the best over-all fit.

IMB

[Ninja Rygar]

Yes, MESS/MAME have, by far, the best possible controller configuration setup. When it comes to setting up your controller, MESS and MAME take the cake, by allowing you to map a button to more than one thing... and allowing you to configure all controller types at once, instead of having to swap them around. It's perfect, and if more emulators did that, GameEx would be much nicer.

But, while I'm still on the subject of the 2600, it's like I said, the video emulation is Mess is terrible. Colors, and size are just way off compared to other emulators. The colors seem too dark, and in fullscreen, everything looks really crappy. If not for that, MESS would be the emulator of choice by far.

While I am on this subject, can anybody tell me why Stella won't work at all? Here's the thing, it used to work just fine... I was trying to get it set up in GameEx, but now all of a sudden, it doesn't open. Double-click the .exe and NOTHING HAPPENS. What's the deal? It's one of those emulators that feels the need to be "installed" (god I hate those) so I unintalled it and tried again, and NOTHIN. I'm using the 32bit version. I've never heard of a program that just won't open. No message, nothing shows up in the task manager... just.... nothing happens. It blows my mind, and it really prevents me from testing this emulator out to it's fullest potential... which sucks because it's supposedly the best of it's kind. I can say, when it did run, I remember not being all that impressed. Compatability with all the different bankswitches and controller types was nice, but there was something that ticked me off. If I could open it back up, I could remember what it was.

Now moving on, I can now give my two cents on the intellivision. I'll make this short and sweet, there's only one reason I can think of not to use mess. No intellivoice. So if you want intellivoice support you have to look to either nostalgia or bliss. Nostalgia sucks ass, I don't care what anybody says. It has another rom launcher frontend that just won't hide. You actually have to have Nostalgia look in a different rom folder than gameex, so it doesn't bother you about updating it's list all the time. Not only that, the thing barely works, it uses directX but doesn't seem to use it properly, which causes it to crash on alot of games. Bliss on the other hand is like, the same thing only it actually works and there's no rom launcher. in fact, there's no anything... bliss has NO OPTIONS what-so-ever besides changing the controls. Speaking of which, because of how the controller gets configured in Bliss, it can't tell the difference between joystick1 and joystick2 if you have more than one plugged into your computer. It just recognizes "Joystick" which is great. Now you have to set up player one with the joystick and player 2 with the keybaord.

So in conclusion, MESS would be the emulator of choice if only it had intellivoice support. There is no other reason to use Nostalgia or Bliss.

[IMBerzerk]

For Intellivision, I use Nostalgia. It has it's quirks, but it's the only one that allows you to use the Classic Game Controller. I think Bliss may allow it now, but it's not native as Nostalgia is. With the CGC, you can use actual Intellivision controllers, which makes a HUGE difference for Intellivision games. Really, you can't play them with out it.

How about Colecovision?

[Ninja Rygar]

Alot of my favorite Intellivision games don't really use the keypad... like Astrosmash... so I still use my controller. For everything else, I'm using the numeric keypad.

It's pretty unavoidable for me...I don't have any of the original controllers, which is why I didn't really take that feature of Nostalgia's into consideration. I didn't even know they made adapters that work... I use a PS2 controller with help from the numeric keypad on the keyboard.

For the colecovision I use the same controller set up... controller plus Keypad. It sucks... but there's little I can do.

Player 2 uses the controller plus the number keys. It seems like using this setup is inevitable for certain systems... I mean... the Odyssey2 has a keyboard ON the console. Emulating that means you're gonna still need the keyboard. So using it for the C-vision and I-vision isn't that big a deal for me.

Oh, yeah... the topic....

For the colecovision, I've never used anything except MESS. I know there are some other options, like BlueMSX can actually emulate the colecovision... but MESS was my first choice, and didn't feel the need to switch to anything else. Maybe I should do some research into it, but I don't really see any reason to. MESS is perfect for Colecovision (And for that matter, the 5200 and the 7800.)

[smd111]

While I am on this subject, can anybody tell me why Stella won't work at all? Here's the thing, it used to work just fine... I was trying to get it set up in GameEx, but now all of a sudden, it doesn't open. Double-click the .exe and NOTHING HAPPENS. What's the deal? It's one of those emulators that feels the need to be "installed" (god I hate those) so I unintalled it and tried again, and NOTHIN. I'm using the 32bit version. I've never heard of a program that just won't open. No message, nothing shows up in the task manager... just.... nothing happens. It blows my mind, and it really prevents me from testing this emulator out to it's fullest potential... which sucks because it's supposedly the best of it's kind. I can say, when it did run, I remember not being all that impressed. Compatability with all the different bankswitches and controller types was nice, but there was something that ticked me off. If I could open it back up, I could remember what it was.

1 do you have the latest ver of stella get it here http://stella.sourceforge.net/downloads.php

2 if you still have problems you can email Stephen Anthony here [email protected]

[darktouch]

i try all kind of emulator for atari78000,atari5600,colecovision and vectrex, i have try all of them. but i had a hard time using them and im a new guy in the emulator config staff. but when i try mess i saw it was easy to use and config, for the reason that is just like mame32. for all those system i prefer mess. them the other emulators. when it comes to nes and snes i haven't try them on mess, because they work pefect with the other emulatos. well that my opinion.

[Ninja Rygar]

To put it simply... I use MESS for the 5600, 7800, Colecovision, Vectrex and... one other system. For everything else, I use a dedicated emulator.

[darktouch]

wow somebody didnt have his coffee and is on the mood. lol anyways yep that what i said lmao

[Ninja Rygar]

I don't drink coffee, but I'm feeling "on the mood" anyway... so here goes...

I take it all back about the 2600. Without being able to use Stella for some unknown reason, I can't really say too much about that, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that MESS is better than Z26 now. I had to mess around with the "Screen" tab in a2600.c in order to get the results I was looking for, and once I did, I threw Z26 to the recycling bin.

Now that that's taken care of I can say that MESS outshines the other emulators in all the most important catagories. Controls obviously, sound, and resolution.

It can't run both NTSC and PAL games on the same system though... MESS uses 2 different systems to emulate the two... and that's not something that can be done in GameEX, (Ok, well I suppose you could seperate the roms into two different folders, set up 2 seperate emulators and group them in the same list in gameex, but damn that's alot of work.) I don't think it's such a big deal.