Okay, I am finally planning an update for the MSX Emulator comparison. It will take a long time before I can even start testing things, but somewhere near the end of this year there will probably be a new comparison, which includes tests of MSXPLAYer (turboR edition), MESS and emulators for Linux.

However, if I'm to test MESS I need your help as I have not been able to use DISK images with this emulator at all. How the #($*(#$* do I attach the DISK.ROM to it's emulation settings?

Beats me...
Although MESS is all nice 'n good, it's by design not flexible enough to accomodate the broad range of different configurations MSX machines have.
From a programmers' point of view, it seems a trivial matter. Someone familiar with the MESS/MAME source code could probably add it with ease.

Recent versions of MESS don't support at all the MSX drives and disk images.

There was a trick that worked with MESS 0.56 (and previous versions), and that is mentioned on the Sean Young page about the MESS driver : insert DISK.ROM in a slot cartridge (you must have a version of DISK.ROM that is accepted by the included rom database ... or you must change the checksum). With this trick, only normal disks images (without special boot sector for example) were accepted.

With versions 0.6x and 0.7x, this trick doesn't work, maybe because the new integrated menu ... And if you check the MESS history about MSX, it seems that Sean Young is no more really active since about one year .

Another example of this non-activity : FM-PAC emulation is still very limited, although MESS include advanced music emulation (part of MESS is used in NLMSX and openMSX for Moonsound emulation)

For my part, I consider that MSX emulation in MESS is freezed ....

More than enough reasons for me not to test MESS.

I submitted a bug report and they fixed it!

bugzilla.mess.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460