Home Page Forums MAME MAME What's with the later versions and the GUI?

Look, I don't want to be negative, but I have to say this: More or less since the introduction of the Apple IIGs emulation (not that it has anything to do, I mention it so you know what versions I'm talking about), the bugs in the GUI (many systems produce errors when launched, history database is missing again) and on MESS itself have multiplied to the extent I can't barely play any of my favourite systems.

What is going on with this emulator? It's always been MESSy, but I'm starting to lose my faith on it.

What is the reason of so many systems producing errors? Are there solutions on the work?

Most of the systems that were broken as of 0.101 should be fixed in the next release (see here for a list) thanks to the efforts of Bletch and judge. Generally problems there come from the continual architectural changes that MAME undergoes (MESS being based on the MAME infrastructure).

The GUI bugs are unfortunately hard to pin down and even harder to fix. Bug 704 is the most annoying currently; Bletch has mentioned wanting to redesign the whole .ini architecture, I dunno if that's necessary to fix it or what. The history being missing should be fixed but I think there's another problem where it doesn't show up on the snapshot pane anymore, it's hard to tell if it's a configuration issue or not though.

In any case, if you notice bugs, the best thing to do is file a Bugzilla report. MESS has a lot of systems but few developers and users, so if you notice a new bug that isn't getting fixed, it's most likely just because no one else has encountered it yet.

Thanks for your quick answer. If I find any annoying bug I'll try to fill a bugzilla report in the future as you say.

By the way, why was this made in 0.102 "- [SMS] Removed hacked drivers smsu13h and smse13h. [Wilbert Pol]"
?

Those were not real BIOSes - they were hacks.

Those hacks did nothing more than play the maze game. They skip the check for a cartrigde and will never go into the cartridge code.

They only differ three bytes from the real bios dump. The three bytes jump into the cartridge detection code on the real bios, and they hold a jump into the maze game on the hacked bios.

Hi, talking about SMS bios I have these that might interest you

<a href="http://www.internet-terrori.st/Sega_Master_System_Prototype_M404_BIOS.zip">Sega Master System Prototype M404 BIOS</a> and <a href="http://www.internet-terrori.st/Sega_Master_System_Store_Display_Unit_BIOS.zip">Sega Master System Store Display Unit BIOS</a>

I thought that the non-hacked BIOSes had that maze game, and that the hacked ones didn't! I couldn't load any SMS ROMs with the non-hacked bioses so I always used the hacked ones.
Incidentally, why do we need the BIOSes anyway? I think that the BIOS-less SMS and SMSPAL systems work good enough.

The BIOSes were swapped. The hacked one were hacked to only run the Maze you would only get by a specific button combination with the non-hacked BIOSes. judge swapped them in his cleanup and then removed them when he found out what was actually hacked in them.
You can use the BIOS-less SMS, if you want, but it's about documentation and completeness and supporting every BIOS version out there is part of it.

Well, I noticed that the SMSE13 and SMSU13 BIOSes (not the hacked ones) from previous versions do not work with version 0.102. However, I also noticed that if I rename the now unsupported SMSE13H and SMSU13H (the hacked BIOSes) to SMSE13 and SMSU13 they do work with 0.102, even though 0.102 is not supposed to support the hacked BIOSes. I guess that's because of the swap you mentioned.
And about that maze game, I asked about it in this thread and no one could tell me that it's because the hacked and non-hacked BIOSes were swapped, and that the maze game is a result of the hack...


What do I actually miss, game-wise, if I use the BIOS-less SMS and SMSPAL? e.g., will games not work as good?