>Have you seen MESS, a derivate of MAME? >They say it emulates Sam Coupe, with all aspects 100% right. I haven't see >it, but it seems at least that we have the third Sam emulator on the scene.
I downloaded a copy of MESS .37b10 for my Mac. Note that the Windows and Unix versions are up to .37b13, though I don't know if any Sam-specific changes have been made during those last three versions. It works, and it's pretty good, though I wouldn't say anywhere near 100% right. There is no display of the border at all, for example. Instruction timings appear to be *completely* wrong[1]. The keyboard works, sort of, but doesn't do any kind of translations for punctuation keys. The sound chip only partially works and it can't play samples at all[2]. Running software... it loads plain or gzipped .DSK files (haven't tried using other formats). MNEMOdemo1 part 2 crashes, just like it does on early SimCoupe. Even MNEMOdemo2 crashes, which I'd previously thought was comparatively emulator-friendly. And for some reason, so does MasterDOS. Conversely, Codigo's Juggler demo does work, which doesn't on early SimCoupe. Other programs I've tried will generally run but show some visual defects due to timing issues. Still, quite an impressive effort. Somebody could improve it (quite a lot accuracy-wise, and also the UI of the Mac version) but personally I don't plan on spending time hacking around at MESS code. I wonder if we'd recognise the name of whoever contributed this? Andrew [1] Probably an accurate Z80B, if it were running with uncontended memory at 6.0MHz. Which we know it isn't. [2] The problems are to do with waveform sounds and are an already documented problem with MAME's implementation of the soundchip. -- --- Andrew Collier ---- ---- http://mnemotech.ucam.org/ --- -- r<2+ T<4* cSEL dMS hEn/CB<BL A4 S+*<++ C$++L/mP W- a-- Vh+seT+ (Cantab) 1.1.4
