What's the deal with the MESS MAME Combo?

[monkeybomb]

I'm probably pretty late to this party, but I updated 10 versions of mame and the consoles are there.  Can we just use MAME for everything now?  How do I play NES Metroid or Conan for the Apple IIe?  I did the obvious from mame64ui and double clicked the NES system.  It starts but wants me to point  to a cart.  I pointed and it doesn't play.  I feel like I'm either an idiot for not getting this going more easily or an idiot for thinking it might work, when it doesn't yet.  Would appreciate any help. 

[Slippyblade]

It does work, but the interface for MESS was always clunky as hell.  I haven't used the newer versions though - still running MAME 149.

[Haze]

The MAMEUI interface is outdated rubbish win9x era code that's barely been maintained (just kept working, nothing more)

it doesn't fully support the features that have been added to MAME over the years, including the non-arcade stuff.

From the commandline for NES it's as simple as "mame64 nes metroidu" assuming you have the correct Software List roms in addition to the basic romset.

for Conan on the 2Gs you can do the basic launch with 'mame64 apple2gs conan'

you then have to press SCRLOCK to switch to partial keyboard mode, this allows you access to the tab menus etc.  Half way through loading, when prompted to flip the disk you need to go into the "File Manager" in the tab menu, and change the disk in the first disk drive to the 2nd disk 'flop2' (by default MAME maps one side to each drive, but the game doesn't seem to support more than 1 drive so you have to do the manual change)

[monkeybomb]

Thank you far answering Haze.  I never did get conan running. But I think it's because I only have disk images (and names) from 10 years ago.  I'm not totally sure how the naming works and the only MESS sets that I can find are version 149 and very incomplete.  Even the guys who seem to have the best mame sets have only partial sets for this.  Having said that, I can run NES games and several other apple games that I wanted.  Overall I like it and I'm curious to see how/if it evolves.  I can't be the only one who sees the advantage of having everything going through the same system.

Does anyone know if future MAME rom sets will include all the console systems?  Seems like everything before CDs would be small compared to the full MAME set now, but I have no idea of how any of that works.

[B2K24]

Does anyone know if future MAME rom sets will include all the console systems?  Seems like everything before CDs would be small compared to the full MAME set now, but I have no idea of how any of that works.

They are known as "software list ROMs"

[monkeybomb]

They are known as "software list ROMs"

That's what I have, so maybe it's just me.  Basically what I downloaded is every rom you can think of, except the apple 2 games stop half way through the letter B.

It's just one game though and it's been fun messing with the new set-up for the other stuff.