What the heck happened to the mess site?

[btoddkelley]

Maybe I have been out of the scene way too long......where is a good site for a mess full release? it appears there download site is down. Googling Mess 145 i can only find sites with broken download links. The intermediate release is availible on the wiki, but I have never been a big fan of those.

Todd

[btoddkelley]

 I found it. Has mess 32 became mess ui? If so, has the same thing happened to mame 32?

[Haze]

first they were xx32
then they were xxui

now they're dead.

they really, really, really *and I can't stress enough really* should not be used.

the UI codebase has become a buggy, unstable, unmaintained mess, it will ruin your overall emulation experience in many ways, and simply lead to frustration when it fails, causes random crashes, corrupts your files, or god knows what else.

just use a regular build with the QMC2 frontend, that's as near to an official frontend as you're going to get these days and is the one actively recommended by the developers of both projects.

[btoddkelley]

Thanks for the info Haze. My cabs always ran the regular mess with mamewah but I thoughtbinwould start with the GUI version since I havent updated in years. (I think I am on 124). Maybe I will forget that idea and go to the regular build. Has mame 32 went the same way?

[Haze]

Thanks for the info Haze. My cabs always ran the regular mess with mamewah but I thoughtbinwould start with the GUI version since I havent updated in years. (I think I am on 124). Maybe I will forget that idea and go to the regular build. Has mame 32 went the same way?

yeah, that's why I say xx32 / xxUI, it was basically the same codebase, the basic MAME / MESS UI code was abandoned by the original developers, maintained mostly by the MESS developers, and eventually dropped from official MESS support too because it was becoming unmaintainable with all the core changes going on.

you *can* still find compiled versions, but as I said they're not really reliable, and lots of little features have had to be hacked out to keep them running at all, they're simply not worth using unless you really can't accept a different frontend.

[btoddkelley]

One more question for you Haze and then I will get back to my studies  of all the changes: do you know if the code that effects controller inputs has changed in the last couple of years? I would love to be able to just drop in a new executable and go, without resetting all of the control settings. This used to be a recipe for disaster with mame/mess, but I thought I would ask.

[Haze]

I find it unlikely that old config files will still work.

There have been several input related changes over the years.  If you're dealing with ctrlr files maybe they'll still work, if you're dealing with stored config files (which seems to be what most people do) they almost certainly won't.

You're not really asking the right person as far as this goes, almost every time I use MAME I'm using it from an entirely fresh built tree with no old files at all.