MESS is the sequel to MAME, the popular Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, except that rather that emulating arcade games, it emulates various consoles and computers. MESS is written by a group of coders, with the Acorn version being ported by Gareth Long (who also ports MAME). It has been developed entirely in C, in order that it can be ported to various different platforms, including DOS, Unix and Mac. The code is based around the same core used for MAME, except with larger individual drivers, and obviously altered to fit the new system. The MESS team also make their beta versions public which means that the latest released version will often be fairly unstable and several drivers may be of very poor quality, if you are aware of this it's no real problem.
Currently Supported...
These drivers are already supported by MESS in the currently
released version:
Megadrive
NES
ColecoVision
TRS-80
ColourGenie
Atari800
Bally Astrocade
KayPro
PDP-1
Vectrex
These drivers are early in development and although supported are very lame, note they are therefore not documented elsewhere on this site:
Atari5200
Apple2
Sega Master System & Game Gear
Coming Soon...
These drivers are in development for future releases of MESS
(that doesn't mean the next release):
Gameboy
BBC B
Several of these systems require copies of the original OS ROMs and other resources before they can run software. These can, and should be downloaded below. Michael Koenig has written a page detailing how to get the various systems up and running on MESS which is very useful if you're stuck.
In the future hopefully many more systems will be implemented, including Atari Lynx, Spectrum, BBC (in development), and many many more. For an initial release, MESS looks very promising indeed, and once the speed is improved (one of the priorities for the team) it'll shape up to be a very powerful emulator. The emulator is entirely command line driven, but to aid ease of use, front ends are available to make it simpler.
Speed Rating: various, though less than a StrongARM is a bit hopeful!
Emulator:
RISC OS MESS
page
The
Official MESS page
Dave's
Classics MESS page
Generic
MESS emulator message board
Unofficial
MESS compatibility list
Frontends:
R.R.Chasmer's
MESS play