MESS Guide

## Choosing which MESS

MESS for Windows comes in two flavors; a command line MESS and a MESS GUI.

## Original Command Line MESS

Firstly for all you newbies, a command line program requires you to type in a command using the keyboard to make a program start. There is no mouse, little help and no lovely buttons to show you what you're doing. So beware this is not for the PC illiterate.

However, if you want to give it a try, you can start MESS by simply typing mess system [devices] [options], where

system | is the system you want to emulate in MESS.
devices | is the optional list of devices supported by 'system' that you want to fill with an image (e.g. carts for a console or floppies for an home computer) and the name of the image you want to load in each device. To know which devices are supported, you can launch mess system -listmedia. Notice that some systems require images in a device to start (e.g. tipically cartridges in a console)
options | is a list of additional MESS options (e.g. to run MESS in a window, to change the font of the internal UI, or to add .png filters to the image). To know which devices are supported, you can simply launch mess -showusage.

Here is an example of how to run a command line MESS:

This will run the Atari 2600 cartridge of Frogger using a 3D card like this:

Notice that in this example: system is 'a2600', devices is '-cart frogger.a26' (here this is mandatory: a2600 would not run without a cart inserted) and options is '-d3d'

For a complete introduction to command line MESS, please refer to the MESS W32 Commands page.

## MESS GUI

The easiest version of MESS is MESS GUI (Graphical User Interface) which has a user friendly point and click interface . This version is more suited for the beginner as you can see everything that you are doing.

It has all of the features of MESS and runs just as fast. The best part is that you have a nice list of all the systems and games you have, you can have preview pictures of your games and to run then you simply need to double click them.