Colecovision with MESS - LaunchBox Tutorial
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- In today's tutorial, I will show you how to get the historical Colecovision up and running with MESS. I've moved on from MESS Standalone to MAME with the integrated MESS code. It's pretty much the exact same process, minus a few extra steps, so it's technically easier! Just find a MAME Split pack, and follow the instructions!
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MESS Console List (Compatability and BIOS identification)
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MESS Command Line List (Cross reference with BIOS name)
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Love my Coleco console memories - Cosmic Avenger was my favorite. Still own Comodore 64 and Colecovision console. Excellent video dude !!
I wish ETA Prime would remake this video
Yeah I'm pretty savvy with this stuff and this guy was all over the place. Just show me how.
one was given to my grandmother. and i remember playing StarTrek on it and had a blast! you did a GREAT job on this one ,MAN!
Thank you very much! I am glad there's a few of you finding this very awesome.
I was able to follow your tutorial right up until you started talking about Bios. I can't find any. Until then everything was going wonderfully.
I just added colecovision to launchbox really easily. I used ColEM 4.8 newest version emulator. Loaded the rom files into emulator folder. Imported games from emulator folder, named emulator ColEM and everything works perfectly. Good luck!
Still have my coleco to this day! We were the only kids to have it since everyone else was doing the Nintendo thing lol.
One of my favourite consoles still got mine in the box.
Nice!
Hi Brad,
Good video as always. The Colecovision was one of my favorite consoles as a kid and I finally added Colecovision to my Launchbox this last Xmas. I used pretty close to your method--- I tried a few different Colecovision emulators but also settled on MAME, largely because of the ease of the controller configuration (fiddling with Retroarch's controller configs makes me crazy, whereas MAME makes it dead simple to set up controls on a per-machine basis). Since I use MAME for several consoles (Intellivision, most of the Ataris, Vectrex) I make a separate emulator for each of those for the sake of simplicity. As a result I have 'MAME (Colecovision)', 'MAME (Intellivision)', 'MAME (Atari 7800)', etc.
Just a couple thoughts and notes... one command switch I like for some of the old consoles is -prescale 2. It's not always a huge difference, but it's one worth considering. YMMV
Controls-wise, I like to get as practically close as possible to the original console's controllers so I bought an Ultimate PC Interface (www.intellivision.us/intvgames/interface/interface.php) for use with Intellivision and Colecovision controllers as there is no modern controller that I know of that can duplicate their unusual functions (keypads, overlays, the Intellivision's 16-direction pad). I bought the Intellivision and Colecovision Flashback replica consoles just for the controllers since they work great with the Ultimate PC Interface. If anyone is considering setting up Colecovision and Intellivision in MAME/Launchbox I highly recommend this setup since it's pretty cheap and gets you as close as possible to that original console feel.
Thanks for the kind words and all that info! So actually, RetroArch has one of the easiest controller set ups, if you use one of the well supported drivers. Dinput and Xinput are the two biggest drivers for controllers, and RetroArch automatically assigns a cores controls properly to a controller (unless it requires a keyboard). In this case though, MAME (specifically the MESS portions), is much more complicated inside of RetroArch. RetroArch and MAME (MESS) are actually extremely similar to each other, but there are extra, convoluted steps, to utilize MESS in RA that is just not worth it. Not to mention, MAME inside of RA is not updated right away. It only recently went from .174 to .180, and .180 is already outdated.
That Ultimate PC Interface looks pretty cool for some quirky set ups. To a lesser degree, that's exactly why I bought a USB N64 controller, because it's too unique.
While I have huge respect for RA and its devs, for me the controller setups are the main issues that make it unusable in a lot of situations. Most systems work just fine mapped to an XBox One pad, but I bought the Mayflash adapters for the Gamecube, Wii, and N64 controllers to get that near-perfect experience.
I was hoping to be able to try out the RA N64 implementation but trying to configure the controls was slowly sapping my will to live so I gave up and went back to Project64. Maybe as RA develops the UI won't feel so hostile to me. If each core had a visual representation of the original controller where you could just click a button on an image to map buttons and axes to your controllers I'd be all over it!
The UI is actually very well done though I would say. Very reminiscent of the PS3 in it's current state. I think their UX needs improvement and it slowly is, but it's certainly a process which we uniquely understand working on LB. I haven't had experience with Mayflash stuff, but if it's reading your controller is as simple as pressing enter then the button on your controller. That generally removes the keyboard buttons too..... yea, it's hard and simple at the same time, which makes zero sense. Hard in all the wrong places? Besides my N64 controller which I've set up already, so that is always good to do with a custom config, their new N64 cores are coming along very very well. They're rewriting it from scratch slowly, and it's going to easily become one of the best, if not the best N64 emulator. I agree with the visual representation, or if they just explained each line better (like what each button actually is), that'd go a long way.
YEAH I REMEMBER THIS IN 1983..i was like wow donkey kong looks like the arcade,lol
I don't have memories of this, but I am finding nuggets of joy here and there with Pre-NES stuff.
Yes! Thank you! Intellivision next baby :)
You're welcome! Intellivision will be coming up eventually. ;)
The best way to learn is to teach!
I've been having an issue that Launchbox will load the Colecovison or Mame games once, but after closing the Mame window no other game will load. The window will appear and close instantly. Running the games directly from the command prompt still works though.
well where is bios file like he said we need to put in MAME roms folder
Somehow, I didn't add the hyphen to the command -nowindow. Working as intended now.
Hello,
I followed the instructions on the tutorial and everything was working great (thanks btw!).
then the next day I tried to fire up some dragonfire and all of my button maps were gone. I remapped them, but they don't work right. I'm using a 360 controller and it seems like all of my buttons are in turbo, and while I map out the number pad so start is number 1 on the keypad when I push start it gives me a 2 player game and then starts me off on castle 7 when I push start again. I would expect it would be one player on castle 1... additionally the d-pad does not respond no matter how I map it and the thumbs tick controls are sluggish to say the least.
I've been reading up on MESS as its my first encounter, but I don't see anything that deals with my experience. I can re-install, but that seems like not a good thing if I have to do it every day.
any suggestions?
I don't know, it seems like things got re-mapped somehow, and I've never actually experienced that. I don't know which ini or config holds this info, but you could replace your MAME files and go back to default, try setting them up again and see if this happens a second time. For all we know, it could have been a freak accident. I also wonder, though unlikely, if your controllers ID changed internally or if something happened with it's identification...
I do have a tendency to launch the emulator with the controller turned off. When I turn it on the button map is not recognized so I have to shut down and really launch the emulator. Then I can remap the buttons, but again something is not right...
so I started having the same problem with retroarch... I reinstalled retro arch and that fixed my issue. I tried the same with MAME/MESS and it's betterish. now I can map the standard coleco buttons (d-pad button 1/2), but when I try to map the number pad buttons to the controller it takes, but the mapping is dull while the standard buttons are bold (gray vs white). the map shows the correct information, but the maps that are white/bold work. the gray/dull do not work...
Can I use a different emulator other than mess? Mess was a mess back in the day.
Of course you can use any emulator your want, but MESS is the best for a lot of systems. I used to use that same pun, and I still think it's not perfect, but RetroArch and MESS have that same requirements, and I love RetroArch, so once I figured it out, it opened up a lot of other systems to be able to emulate well. ColEm should also be a decent emulator, but I still think MESS is better.