MESS ebuild? (Multiple Emulator Super System)

[lyallp]

Wondering if anyone knows of a MESS ebuild? http://www.mess.org/

There is an xmess in portage, but that is for MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator).
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...Lyall

[Shining Arcanine]

I just looked at MESS and it claims to support 461 unique systems. Someone clearly has too much time on their hands. Anyway, after digging around, it seems that MESS depends upon MAME, which is in the portage tree:

http://packages.gentoo.org/package/games-emulation/sdlmame

There is also an overlay avaliable for mess, although I do not know if it is an official overlay:

http://gpo.zugaina.org/games-emulation/sdlmess/ChangeLog

The latest versions of both MAME and MESS are 0.137 while these ebuilds are 0.136, so if you are unwilling to use the older version, you will want to either file bug reports, in the hope that it will prompt their maintainers will write new ebuilds, or write your own 0.137 ebuild based upon the 0.136 ebuilds. Should you choose the former, I am not sure how you will be able to file a bug report for the mess ebuild, as I do not know if Gentoo's bugzilla is responsible for it. Should you choose the latter, there are guides available for writing ebuilds:

http://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/index.html
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Writing_Ebuilds
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=2&chap=1

If you do write ebuilds for the latest versions, please file bug reports with them so others can benefit. While this is probably not exactly the answer you wanted, I hope it is a start.

[lyallp]

Thanks for taking the time to do the research and to reply.

Subsequent reading of the sdlmess home page implies that sdlmess is distributed as part of sdlmame.

This must be where my confusion came from.

If you think sdlmess has lots, you should check out mame. 9800+ rom files... excluding the compressed hard disk images.

I may try building the xmess and see what happens. I already have sdlmame installed using advancemenu.

I am interested because I used to own an Apple ][+ (it's lying around in a shed somewhere) and am keen to see if I can show my kids what computers really where!


_________________
...Lyall

[paulbiz]

The MAME/MESS source changed a lot between 0.136 and 0.137, but in 136 and prior building MESS was just a matter of editing the makefile to build mess rather than mame and that's it, it always worked fine for me.