MESS CD-i emulation (MAME clone)
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 11:45 pm
I have been contacted by two people about assisting the MESS project (a fork of MAME) with their CD-i emulation driver.
Before any of you get their hopes up, I've taken a quick look at the MESS CD-i emulation sources and it seems to be about at the stage where CD-i Emulator was around summer 2003, two years before the public release.
Unfortunately, this is exactly where the hard part begins. Based on a comparison of video emulation sources, I'd say the MESS code is at a few percent completion at most, and this is for video emulation alone, arguably the easiest part of CD-i emulation. So far MESS only emulates the 68070 processor and a small part of the MCD 212 video chips, and these are both documented. From this point on they will hit nothing but undocumented chips (except for a few small support chips such as NVRAM).
However, I am willing to share information; we are currently trying to work out a way to do it.
Before any of you get their hopes up, I've taken a quick look at the MESS CD-i emulation sources and it seems to be about at the stage where CD-i Emulator was around summer 2003, two years before the public release.
Unfortunately, this is exactly where the hard part begins. Based on a comparison of video emulation sources, I'd say the MESS code is at a few percent completion at most, and this is for video emulation alone, arguably the easiest part of CD-i emulation. So far MESS only emulates the 68070 processor and a small part of the MCD 212 video chips, and these are both documented. From this point on they will hit nothing but undocumented chips (except for a few small support chips such as NVRAM).
However, I am willing to share information; we are currently trying to work out a way to do it.