Difference between revisions of "JSMESS"

Revision as of 07:30, 12 October 2013

JSMESS emulating a CPC6128 in Chromium 30 on Linux

JSMESS is a JavaScript port of MESS that runs in modern web browsers like Chrome and Firefox and is considered to be in its public beta stage right now. Particularly sound is still a problem.

History and development roadmap

The JSMESS project was originally proposed in a blog post by Jason Scott of textfiles.com and The Internet Archive in October 2011.[1] The idea was to have a system for preservation of old computers and game consoles that runs directly in the web browser without any plugins.

Initial progress was slow because the Emscripten transcompiler had to be fixed and improved during development. In 2013, JSMESS reached a fairly usable state and was declared to be in public beta.

Ideally JSMESS should later also have snapshot capabilities so if e.g. a certain feature is discussed on a web page, JSMESS can take you directly to that point in the game.

Also, keymapping and a virtual keyboard on the screen are planned for JSMESS, although in principle you should already be able to create keymaps in MESS and use them with JSMESS.

JSMESS development is heading toward its 1.0 version. The list of systems that are supposed to be officially supported by 1.0 also includes the CPC464/664/6128 (although the printer is erroneously listed as the program medium for the CPC on the list).

Building from source

Out of the box only a small selection of MESS machines can be immediately compiled to JavaScript from the JSMESS package. Compiling MESS in its entirety would create a JavaScript file that is far too big for web browsers to handle. So one has to find out which parts of MESS are really needed for a given machine and create Makefiles with that subset. (JSMESS now also includes scripts that automate this task.)

It is recommended to build JSMESS modules on Linux which also makes it easier to install the dependencies for Emscripten. The basis for JSMESS is MESS 0.142 and a custom version of Emscripten.

A JSMESS fork that includes the necessary Makefiles to build the CPC6128 version exists.

Features and status

As of October 2013, sound only works in Firefox and not in Chrome/Chromium. Emulation speed in Firefox is better than in Chrome, presumably because Firefox has better support for Emscripten's asm.js-based JS code. The joystick is mapped to Alt and the arrow keys by default.

Usage on web pages and CPC demo page

Right now the way to get JSMESS running on a page is to edit the top of messloader.js so that gamename points to a DSK file for drive A.

Also, you need to provide the zipped ROM file. Note that the ROM file cpc6128.zip as on the demo page below also needs to contain the AMSDOS ROM from cpc464.zip because unlike regular MESS, JSMESS only loads a single ROM ZIP file per machine.

This JSMESS CPC demo page (with the SubHunter disc in drive A) also has a ZIP file download of the build with the JS, ZIPs, and HTML. Resolution is set to MODE 1 (384x272), but you can either set a higher resolution in messloader.js or use the zoom functionality of the browser to get a larger picture.

Links

• Official site
• GitHub page with source code (without any CPC makefiles right now)
• Fork with added CPC6128 makefiles
• CPC6128/SubHunter demo page
• Jason Scott, initiator of the project, at Wikipedia