Very confused about MAME and MESS

SpudsMcToole

Or to be specific, lr-mame2015.

As I understand it, MESS is incorporated into the later versions of MAME, which I presume includes lr-mame2015. My question is, how do I run a non-arcade game with it, assuming that's actually possible?

The default EMULATORS.CFG line for lr-mame2015 is

lr-mame2015 = "/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-mame2015/mame2015_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/arcade/retroarch.cfg %ROM%"

But I can't begin to guess how to alter that to run, say, a Bally Astrocade game, and just putting it in like that (with the last bit changed to astrocade/retroarch.cfg -cart %ROM%) results in a crash because it's trying to run an arcade game called "spacefrt" instead of the Astrocade one.

[libretro INFO] Starting game:/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/astrocade/spacefrt.zip
[libretro INFO] Game name: spacefrt, Game description: Space Fortress (CVS)
[libretro INFO] Creating frontend for game: spacefrt
[libretro INFO] Softlists: 0
SOURCE FILE: src/mame/drivers/cvs.c
PARENT: 0
NAME: spacefrt
DESCRIPTION: Space Fortress (CVS)
YEAR: 1981
MANUFACTURER: Century Electronics
[libretro INFO] Screen orientation: VERTICAL
Value  not supported for option netdevprovider - falling back to auto
[libretro INFO] OSD initialization complete
sf-gp1.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
sf-gp2.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
sf-gp3.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
sf-gp4.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
sf-gp5.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
sf-sdp1.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
sf-sp1.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
sf-cp1.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
sf-cp2.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
sf-cp3.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
5b.bin NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
82s185.10h NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
82s123.10k NOT FOUND (tried in spacefrt spacefrt)
Required files are missing, the game cannot be run.

(I tried installing lr-mess instead, but it gave me an incomprehensible error of needing a "gcc" of at least level 5.0, whatever the heck that means. Pretty sure it requires defeating at least one wizard.)

mitu

MAME incorporated MESS in May 2015 (Mame version 0.162), while the mame2015-libretro is based around the early 2015 (0.160) MAME version, so there's no MESS support in that core.

Having said that, the Libretro MAME cores in RetroPie don't necessarily include the MESS (i.e. non-arcade) parts. There are separate packages - lr-mess and lr-mess2016 including the MESS bits.

SpudsMcToole

@mitu Ah. Bummer. Cheers for letting me know. Sadly I can't install lr-mess for some reason and as far as I've ever been able to ascertain neither lr-mame2016 nor lr-mess2016 actually run anything.

rkoster

@SpudsMcToole try my guide here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/22600/how-to-emulate-bally-astrocade-vtech-creativision-and-emerson-arcadia-2001-in-lr-mess

SpudsMcToole

@rkoster Cheers, but as I said, unfortunately I'm unable to install lr-mess for reasons I don't understand.