Yes it is big! I wrote a few drivers for MAME which MESS is a derivative.
It was very easy to remove
unwanted drivers and recompile. To use first download the mess0125b.zip
binaries and unzip it. You should
place the QL ROM's in the roms subdirectory, but I found I could only get
the emulator working if they
were placed in the directory containing 'messui.exe' (I'm probably doing
something stupid).
In my case the MESSUI.EXE program is c:\mess0125b\
The QL rom chip images ("bios" for MESS) are c:\mess0125b\roms\ql.zip
It says you can put them in a folder called ROMS which should be in the
binaries directory. If they go in here, they should remain zipped and
they'll be handled correctly. If you unzip them, they need to be in a
sub-folder of the same name as the .zip archive, so if you want to unzip the
ql.zip files, you'd need to put them in a sub-folder called ql within the
roms directory (c:\mess0125b\roms\ql\). Here's a quote from the
instructions:
"It is recommended to leave these files zipped for neatness' sake, however
MESS will also recognize the files if they are extracted to subdirectories,
e.g. roms\coco3.zip could be extracted to roms\coco3\coco3.rom and
roms\coco3\disk11.rom. Extracting the files into the roms folder itself will
not work."
I got the chip images from http://mess.slor.net/ but searching for
"mess"+"bios"+"ql" threw up a number of sites with bios images (they call
them bios because a rom could be a game cartridge for example). There's a
number of chip images in the ql.zip file and there are all sorts of command
line options to start the emulator with whichever QL rom you need. The
choice is large, and includes international versions of the QL rom and even
less common ones like TB and Tyche!
Unfortunately, the publishers of MESS aren't able to include the necessary
bios/rom chip images with Mess itself (and it would probably make the
archive even bigger for 250 emulators), probably for copyright reasons. Here
in Europe, at least, we ought to be OK with the QL code, but just be aware
that copyright can be an issue in these matters.
I had a bit of a time with the instructions, which seem to be a mix of .htm
and .txt files in the sources archive. Then I noticed that there's a file
called mess.chm which seems to bring up a Windows-help type set of
instructions, where you can click on any part of the instructions in the
left hand window and work your way through as you need. At first I thought
there was no search system, but CTRL F brings up a Windows Find box.
The required
ROM files are typically: ipc8049.ic24, ql.js 0000.ic33, and ql.js
8000.ic34. Note the emulator supports
many QL ROM versions including Minerva. Click on 'messui.exe' to start the
program and scroll down
to find the QL to run it. The great thing about this emulator is the well
documented source code and the
ease in upgrading it. It should be very easy to drop in a 68040 and
emulate a Gold card running SMSQ.
I look forward to trying out the 68040 version when you've got it working,
Malcolm ;-))
Dilwyn Jones
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