Building MESS 0.142

Some of the new helper scripts require a full build of MESS, and you can't really build full MESS from JSMESS right now (issue #20), so you need to download and build our particular version of MESS separately if you want true compatibility testing.

The version of MESS which JSMESS uses is pretty old: 0.142u6, from June 19, 2011. Yeah, over two years out of date, now.

devesine used this commit, a few days after the MAME 0.142u6 tag, as the original basis for JSMESS: http://git.redump.net/mess/commit/?id=577f2b3ae0043dbd77273f1bd269ff1cc3305b0f

Download MESS from there and put it somewhere.

To compile that old a MESS, you need GCC 4.6 and G++ 4.6 (most systems will ship with 4.7), and some other bits and bobs. On my Ubuntu system, I was able to do sudo apt-get install gcc-4.6 g++-4.6 libgconf2-dev to get the things I was missing. Rather than change your GCC/G++ version at the system level, edit the MESS makefile, changing lines 301 and 302 to CC = @gcc-4.6 and LD = @g++-4.6. Then, run make TARGET=mess and it should build without incident.

You can test it by pointing its -rompath to your JSMESS builds', e.g. ./mess64 -window -rompath ../jsmess/bios/.