[advancemame-users] AdvanceCD - Building a custom MESS CD

[Samwise <sa...@ba...>]

Hi,

I've attempted to burn an AdvanceCD (2.6.2) and use it with some MESS games
which I know work with MESS 0.89 - 0.97, and not had much luck.  The CD
boots to the MAME screen, so I changed the emulator to the MESS screen,
where it lists 20 of the games with a rather bizarre mix and match of game
name/system name.

Very few of the games work at all - the only one I can remember which did
was a game boy cartridge image which loaded into the gb driver but should
actually have been run as a game boy color image.

In the interests of full disclosure, I'll point out that my eventual goal is
to duplicate this CD, which is a custom bootable CD for 13 variants of a
classic UK platformer called Chuckie Egg, that I've built on top of FreeDOS
using the DOS port of MESS:

http://www.bagshot-row.org/chuckie-egg/bootablece.html

The obvious limitation to this is that there's no way to auto-detect a
soundcard using DOS, so there's no sound with this version - hence my wish
to move over to a linux based solution.  AdvanceCD seems perfect for this,
if I can work out how to make it work and customise it as necessary.

You can see from the AUTORUN.BAT file downloadable off that page, which acts
as the main menu, that I know the command line instructions to load each of
the 13 images, and also which driver to load them into (e.g. the gbcolor
driver instead of the gb driver, in the case of the gameboy version).

I want the CD to list the 13 specific releases I'm interested in and,
preferably, ignore any other files which happen to be in the software
directory.  I'll also need to show appropriate copyright information either
on boot up and/or the main menu (I've been given permission to distribute
the games, but not the BIOSes - which is why I have to describe how to build
the CD rather than just host a more convenient ISO image).  Finally, it
would be preferable to boot straight into the MESS emulator and not the MAME
one (as there will be no MAME games on the CD).

Can someone pls tell me whether this is an achievable goal using AdvanceCD,
or should I look to taking something like Knoppix and rolling my own with
XMESS?

If it is achievable, could someone give me some pointers on exactly how I'd
go about specifying the 13 images I want on the menu and how to load them
into my preferred drivers?

I'd appreciate any response, as AdvanceCD looks really cool but I'm at a bit
of a loss as to how to get started with it.  From the advcd.txt file, it
appears I should be able to customise the cd image using custom scripts like
image/arcade/advcd.sh, advcd.rc, advmess.rc and/or advmenu.rc, but I'm not
quite sure how to use them to get AdvanceMENU to appear how I want.

Can anyone point me to further info/examples on how to use the scripts
mentioned above?

Again, thanks in advance for any pointers you can give me,

Sam.

P.S.  I do know that the BBC B driver was broken after MESS 0.89 was
released and wasn't fixed until I pointed it out in time for the 0.97
release - so it won't work in this version of the AdvanceCD, which is based
on a MESS version prior to that, I believe.  The ZX Spectrum driver also
seems to fail to run either CE1 or CE2 properly currently - this broke
sometime after MESS 0.89 and has yet to be fixed.  All the other images
listed in the AUTORUN.BAT file I believe should work perfectly, in the
version of MESS this release of AdvanceCD is based on.