MESS in MAME – CDi

The developer said:

If you’ve been following progress by ‘Just Desserts’ on the CDi driver for MESS over at their Forums you’ll have seen that a lot of good progress has been made over the past few weeks.

Several people (including other developers) have asked me how they can get this progress running in MAME instead of MESS, so I’ve quickly ported it over (it’s only a couple of lines that need changing)

I’ve uploaded a diff for MAME at this location

There are two diff files included, one patches against the current MESS cdi.c file (which you can grab from the MESS SVN if you so desire) This clearly shows which lines need changing to make it work with MAME.

The other is a patch against current MAME, containing the current MESS code for the driver.

There are still bugs, as expected (they exist in MESS too) but this allows people to see the progress at least, without having to figure out MESS.

I take no credit at all for the driver, nor do I want any reports on the instability of the emulation in it!

The CHDs expected were created by mounting the TOSEC images in Daemon Tools, extracting (in RAW mode) with burnatonce to an image file with a .toc. and then running through chdman -createcd image.toc

Have fun, and be sure to check out the MESS SVN and update / patch the driver yourself with the diffs included if you want more up-to-date code. Likewise, if you want to add extra games, you’ll have to add them yourself. I may decide to integrate more console systems from MESS into HazeMD at some point, but I’m not decided on that one yet.

For controls, the CDI defaults to a mouse controller, which isn’t very good for playing something like Hotel Mario. I recommend you remap the keys in MAME, setting the digital speed of the Analog X/Y to 5-10, and mapping the buttons to the standard Shift+Control. The game only processes the inputs as digital anyway, so you don’t lose anything by mapping them as such.

Hotel Mario plays well, aside from some flicking of the sprites near the bottom. Personally I don’t think the game is as bad as some reviews make out, and I find it much more playable than the Zelda titles on the platform! Tetris is also perfectly playable and seems fine except for an audio glitch in the first piece of music (the others seem fine, so I guess it could be a problem with the image being used?) It’s not a terrible version of Tetris, although the ‘Level X’ intermissions every couple of lines, and shifting of the playfield for each different background gets irritating to say the least. Sadly the majority of the things released for the system fall into the ill-conceived category of ‘if it has video it must be a good, no matter how bad the game is!!’ that was popular with developers around the time it was released (see SegaCD for another example of this)

Source:http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/