DoktorSeven

Currently playing with: MESS.

Not an actual mess, this MESS — the Multiple Emulator Super System.

The concept of emulation has always fascinated me. The idea that you can take one system, run a program on it that essentially does every single thing a piece of hardware does and simulate it in software, and display the results within an existing OS or on a dedicated system is a very powerful one. It brings hardware that physically does not exist in your personal space to life, virtually, on your computer or whatever you choose to run it on.

Oddly, I can’t remember the first time I stumbled upon this concept, but I am certain that one of the things that made me awe at the possibilities was MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Its job, done in an executable a few dozen megabytes big and a handful of configuration files, is no less than the emulation of thousands — yes, thousands — of arcade games of various types, from the traditional old arcade games such as Pac-Man to more complex machines such as Dance Dance Revolution and everything in between. While this may sound impressive enough, very few of these machines have very much in common, so MAME’s creators and maintainers have to write code for so many different machine types and so many different kinds of internal software, hardware, input devices, displays, and so on. All one has to do is provide the actual code that was embedded in any given arcade machine’s memory banks in a certain format agreed upon by MAME’s developers and the community at large, and one can play that game as if you had the actual machine in front of you — to the limitations of your system, that is (you’re probably not going to have a real arcade controller for your computer unless you specifically order one for use with MAME and similar games, for example).

But I had long since gotten a handle on the wonders of MAME. I use it a lot and enjoy what it provides. What I didn’t was a sort of blood-relative project of MAME, called MESS. While I have curiously poked at MESS in the past, I don’t think I was too aware of its scope and possibilities before now, because what MAME does for arcade games, MESS does for home systems.  Except for fairly recent systems, if you can think of a type of computer or gaming system that has ever been released, MESS either fully supports it or is working on doing so. It has the obvious stuff like the Nintendo Entertainment System (the “NES”), the Playstation, the Commodore 64, and so on, but when you look at the enormous list of 1,161 systems the GUI version of the program presents to you when it loads and you suddenly get the idea of the scope of this thing. The old Apple II systems? They’re there, along with the Apple I, the Apple GS, the Lisa, and even the old Classic Macs. Atari computers, the Color Computer (“coco”), Intellivision, the SSEM “Baby”, older models of the IBM PC, and so, so much more. I feel like I’m walking down dusty rows of some ancient computer museum, except the only dust is what is on my desk and all these machines are right here, virtually, on my computer. Sure, some aren’t properly emulated yet, and MESS itself occasionally crashes on me, but it’s fun to walk down history, and best of all, actually be able to play with it, as they even allow you to insert disk/cartridge/CD/etc images of software for that system and run it.

It’s absolutely breathtaking. Thank you, MESS developers, for bringing such a wonderful thing into existence.