Home Page Forums MAME MAME Mess UI question for etabeta

When using the Windows build of Mess for Mac IIci system emulation, everything seems to work fine when run from a command prompt. But if I let Mess run directly through Windows UI instead of a command prompt, it doesn't acknowledge some of the options I have setup in maciici.ini, specifically it ignores my set ramsize. Is this normal behavior for Mess? or would the options need to be set up in the maciici.cfg file instead? Also, has anyone ever looked into the possibility of adding a setting in the built-in Mess UI for configuring system ram? There probably aren't a lot of us out there that prefer to use that method over command-line or 3rd party UIs.

I think the correct contact person for MESSUI is Robbbert.
MESSUI or MESS NEWUI for Windows is no more official supported by the other MESS devs.

The original question as PMed was that the problems occur when you run MESS without a system and choose maciici from the built-in system picker. If he actually means from MESSUI that's obviously a very different question and should go to Robbbbert as noted.

There does not seem to be an option in MESSUI to turn ON/OFF the following:
#
# CORE CONFIGURATION OPTIONS
#
readconfig 1
writeconfig 1

ShadowMyst should make sure that these options are on in the .ini file for the desired emulation. Then ramsize can be set from the main MESSUI window for each desired emulation and it should be remembered. It is for the systems I want to use.

R Belmont was correct, I was referring to the official Mess not the MessUI variant.

Running Mess from command prompt allows it to read and write the ini file. Running Mess empty and then selecting Mac IIci from the list of installed drivers causes it to ignore the maciici.ini file.

Sounds like this is not a MESSUI issue, but rather a MESS UI issue (note the space). I personally have come across so many bugs in the default UI that I'd recommend against using it at all.

you have to wait for Micko to show up and reply then, because I don't really know when the ini files shall be taken into account to avoid breaking other usage

I'm not really a UI expert, especially in its current form... I've just added in the past 2 or 3 features that I really needed to being able to keep working on it




care to post at MameTesters so that we get a chance to fix some of them?
I'm surprise to have to tell this to a dev...

I must state that my comments are directed at the OP's problem - the internal system/game menu, rather then the tab menu.

With the game menu, honestly I thought some of the issues were so obvious that they WERE known, just nobody was able to fix them. Other problems come down to the basic design when it was first created, so may or may not be classed as bugs.

But, anyway, sure, since they are not known, I'll log them in at MT.

the main problem I'm aware of is that systems with no bios and mandatory carts cannot be launched when you start "mess.exe" only
I cannot really remember other big issues with the internal UI that are not fixable regressions (even if my memory could be doing a bad job )


concerning the OP report the situation is tricky and it probably needs someone with a better understanding of how options from ini/cmdline work in MAME
the culprit is in src/emu/mame.c lines 233-234 which sets ramsize to "" with command line priority (which is higher than ini priority)

however, we cannot just drop those lines because they are there for one specific reason: if you launch from commandline e.g. "mess macclas2 -ramsize 6M", and then you switch to maciici from the internal UI, then without those lines the 6M option would be fed to maciici which would find it invalid (emulator could even possibly fail in this case if you switch to a system with no -ram option, but I haven't tested...)
those lines currently 'unset' the invalid option, but unfortunately prevent the ini value from being used... and I have no idea how to workaround this procedure without breaking some other case

what makes really unfortunate the situation is that RAM options cannot be selected from the internal UI (and it resisted to all my attempts to add support for it, because of the way the ram device is designed), so that users are forced to specify ramsizes at command line for the time being...