etabeta's playground

Long time with no news, but I’ve been really busy with work, and real life…

Moreover, Eclipse (the svn front-end I was using) decided to make my life real hard: it kept giving me errors when I was trying to update my sources to latest developments and it decided to delete (without the expected prompting for confirmations) a few changes I was working on for MAME [1] and that I will need to rewrite, when I’ll have some more time. In the end, I switched to svnX, a very nice OSX GUI, but the headaches Eclipse gave me are still around 🙁

However, MESS development has progressed very fast while I was concerned with non-emu stuff! A huge number of skeleton drivers had been added before 0.132 and immediately after, to preserve the known dumps of obscure machines and to document available info about hardware and memory maps, in perfect MAME-style. And these additions start to produce actual results!

Mahlemiut is doing an awesome job with Fujitsu FM-7 and FM-77AV! In particular, MESS is the first chance for Mac users to see emulated this family of Japanese computers!

Moreover, thanks to Micko, we have emulation of the Canon CAT, of the Videoton TV Computer 64, of the AC-1 and of many Eastern Europe computers which have never been emulated before. He also did some work on the Nintendo Virtual Boy (but no visible results yet)!

Finally, Curt Coder keeps changing skeletons in perfectly working systems, bringing to MESS users emulation of Bondwell 12 & 14, of Tiki 100 & Contiki 100 and of C-80, LC-80 & LC-80.2 among the others.

Adding the ongoing work to fix NES emulation by Heretical One, the coming soon official addition of Game Boy Advance emulation and the fixes to BeBox machines (both courtesy of Arbee), I think MESS has never been so exciting to use! 🙂

[1] Basically, I was converting a few EEPROM chips used in naomi.c and ksys573.c to be MAME devices. Nothing really exciting for the end user, but useful to make the source cleaner.