MESS & TI 99/4A

[bkenobi]

I haven't messed with MESS in a LOOOONG time. I don't remember at this point how to even set up the directory structure so I can get things going. If anyone can post a link to a tutorial, that would be awesome. Thanks.

[celly]

I found this super useful when I configured MESS -

http://www.atariage.com/7800/emulation/mess_tutorial/

[Krakerman]

Well I am using rom filter of: *.rpk

and my command line is:

messpp.exe ti99_4a -cart1 "[ROMPath]\[RomFile]" -joy -now -nonewui

depending on what version of MESS your using it might be just mess.exe instead of messpp.exe

Hopefully that gives you an idea of how to setup. If you look at MESS website they tell you all the commands to use for each emulator (Ex. Under Device ... Instances ... that is the command line option to use for the specified filetypes).

[bkenobi]

Well, I grabbed the latest version of MESS which includes the UI version apparently. I put my roms in the software directory. I put my bios in a BIOS directory. I then pointed MESS to those paths. BUT, I'm getting an error asking for some missing files. I don't have the emulator in front of me, but it was something like U60xx.xxx etc. I'll have to verify paths, but none of those files match the bios or rom file names. I'm obviously missing something.

Perhaps a better question I should have led off with is... What emulator do you recommend for TI-99/4A in GameEx? MESS isn't usually (from what I've read) the preferred emulator for most systems. I've tried others in the past, but never with GameEx integration or the arcade cabinet in mind.

[Krakerman]

Your bios should be where you put the software/games at. Just put them in the same directory.

[Tempest]

You can put them anywhere, you just need to set the directory in Mess.

[bkenobi]

I found a guide that included all needed files for MESS 0.37 IIRC. I played around with it for a while and found that, although it did play the games correctly, it had a lot of lag problems. Perhaps it was something similar to -triplebuffer, but either way, it wasn't that impressive. Considering I was running on a X2 5200+ processor Win7 x64, I expected more.

I played with Classic99 for a bit and was pretty impressed with it. It even includes all roms and bios that Texas Instruments owns the rights too since they gave the author permission to use them. The emu looks great and performs well. The only problem with it that I see is that it doesn't appear to support command line launching of games. If I went that route, I'd have to put together a wrapper to launch games. Of course, I may need one anyway since I don't really want to break out the keyboard if I don't have to.

[Krakerman]

I'm running the latest MESS on Win 7 Home x64 and it runs very smooth and nice. He is correct that you can have the games anywhere, but you need to have the bios in the same directory or you will get errors. I tried to keep them in seperate folders but kept getting errors so I put the bios zip files in the games folder and set that in MESS and they run fine.