=============================== Massage FAQ v0.61 (26 Oct 1996) =============================== This FAQ is intended as a supplement to MASSAGE.TXT which accompanies the emulator. Make sure you read that first, it is worth it you know! Send questions or comments to Duncan McKay (dmckay@dircon.co.uk) * - New or updated since last version Contents -------- 1. What is Massage? Where did it get its name? Who wrote it? 2. Are you related to the author? 3. What do I need to run Massage? *4. Where do I get the latest version? When will the next version be available? What features will the next version have? 5. Can I be a beta tester? 6. How can I speed up the emulator? How can I slow down the emulator? 7. Where can I find SMS and GG games? 8. Where is Phantasy Star for the SMS? Why doesn't the SMS Phantasy Star work? 9. How many games are around for the SMS and GG? Why are there no new games being released on the internet? 10. What games are known not to work? 11. Why doesn't game "XXXXX" work with the emulator? *12. What are the emulation options in the [F8] screen for? What emulation options do I need for game "XXXXX"? 13. Why do some games play scratchy white noise? 14. What games have two player Gear-to-Gear support? *15. Which games contain separate English and Japanese versions? *16. Why does the emulator take ages to start up? 17. Why does the file selector pop up straight away? Isn't there an internal Rom? 18. Why isn't my joystick correctly calibrated? 19. Why doesn't modem play seem to work properly? Why does game "XXXXX" tell me to check the link? 20. Why doesn't my saved game snap file work? 21. Will Game Genie emulation be added? 22. Any plans for Novell networks or TCP/IP support for Gear-to-Gear games? 23. What does the Japanese FM chip option do? 24. Where can I get cheats and tips on SMS and GG games? 25. Any plans for a built in disassembler and monitor? 26. Are there plans for ports of Massage to other platforms? -1-------- Q. What is Massage? Where did it get its name? Who wrote it? A. The name Massage is an acronym from 'Master System and Gamegear Emulator', and the name was also chosen from an amusing spelling mistake in the GG version of Alien Syndrome, where in the intro you receive an "Emergency Massage". It is written by James McKay (jmk@spuddy.mew.co.uk), and was originally developed as an extension from his Spectrum emulator written for a university project. -2-------- Q. Are you related to the author? A. No. James is just a pal from university with the same surname as me. -3-------- Q. What do I need to run Massage? A. Massage is a DOS PC program. The base machine speed recommended is a 486DX4-100, although most games are playable on slower machines (see the question on speeding up/slowing down the emulator). Massage should also run fine from inside Win3.1/95/NT in full-screen Dos mode, normally at a slight performance reduction of 3-4%. You'll need roughly 1.7 Meg of free memory to run it. You should also have an Adlib or compatible card for decent sound, although you can use the PC speaker if you really want. Massage also supports up to two joysticks or joypads, and a modem or serial cable if you want to play two player Gear-to-Gear games. You'll also need some Rom images of SMS or GG games of course. -4-------- Q. Where do I get the latest version? When will the next version be available? What features will the next version have? A. The latest version as of 26th October 1996 is v0.61. Check http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~dmckay/x128.html for all the latest. -5-------- Q. Can I be a beta tester? A. You are already running the latest beta version, basically as soon a version is fit for other people to test, it is released. The work in progress versions are really changed far too often, and at this stage most bugs are already known or features are not machine-dependent enough for widespread pre-release testing. It's not a commercial product, so why bother too much? If something doesn't work for you, email and it'll probably be fixed next time. -6-------- Q. How can I speed up the emulator? How can I slow down the emulator? A. The main method of changing the emulation speed is by adjusting how many frames are drawn in comparison to the original - for example, by only drawing every second frame, the emulation speed is usually increased by a factor of 1.6 or so. Frame skipping 1 in 2 will normally not detract from the game at all, however the effects will become more noticeable and the emulation speed boosted less and less as the skip rate is increased. Most games will be pretty unplayable with a skip rate of 5 or more. The other method of adjusting the speed is using the delay setting - this only slows down the emulation for fast machines. As from v0.6 of Massage, the emulation speed is automatically adjusted to as near 100% as possible on startup, using the above methods. P90s and higher will run at faster than 100% speed. Anything slower than a 486DX-66 will be unable to reach 100% speed, even with frame skip. The autodetect will not set a higher frame skip than 5, although you can set it higher manually if you want. Note that the actual emulated speed varies slightly from game to game, and that making the screen size bigger will naturally slow up the speed a bit. Modem play at the moment slows up the emulation considerably, but this is not reflected in the reported speed in the [F1] screen. You can manually change the emulator speed settings inside the Massage Options screen by pressing [F1] and using left/right to increase or decrease the settings. -7-------- Q. Where can I find GG and SMS games? A. Don't know, sites change so quickly. I suggest you go and use an internet search engine to try and find some links. -8-------- Q. Where is Phantasy Star for the SMS? Why doesn't the SMS Phantasy Star work? A. Neither myself or James have seen a working SMS Phantasy Star yet. We have seen two versions, one a fake (the Japanese GG one renamed .SMS) and one corrupt one - see the later section on why games don't work to learn how to spot corrupt rom images. Phantasy Star is a 512K game, any other sized versions definitely won't work. -9-------- Q. How many games are around for the SMS and GG? Why are there no new games being released on the internet? A. My estimate is there are about 220 or so working SMS and GG Roms floating around the internet just now. There seems to be no new stuff appearing because no-one has a sure-fire way of copying SMS and GG Roms. The best bet for copying SMS Roms at the moment seems to be using the Multi-Game Doctor 2 Megadrive/Genesis copier and the Power Base Convertor, but nobody has confirmed to me this actually works. Other copiers usually produce corrupt Rom images (see the later section on how to spot corrupt images). A few people are working on custom copiers, but have not completed them yet. -10------- Q. What games are known not to work? A. The list of the games with noticeable emulation bugs are listed below. If you have a game which doesn't work and isn't listed here, check the next question. If you are playing a Gear-to-Gear game which is a bit dodgy, see later in this FAQ. Alex Kidd Lost Stars (SMS) - Screen goes black Chessmaster (GG) - No hand sprite Pop Breakers (GG) - Stuck on title screen GP Rider (GG) - Mush appears on Bike Select screen Barcelona 92 (SMS) - Mush appears during some scrolling events Surf Ninjas (GG) - Sega logo mushed up Popeye (GG) - Mush in middle of Area Select screen Mah Jong (GG) - Screen drawing problems -11------- Q. Why doesn't game "XXXXX" work with the emulator? A. If the game isn't listed in the previous section, it may not work for the following reasons: * The Rom image must have an .SMS or .GG extension to work. * There may be an unusually-sized header on the Rom image. Massage accepts either raw images or images with a 512 byte header. * The image may be corrupt, usually from being dumped by a copier incorrectly. There are quite a few images like this floating about the internet. To check if this is the case, look at the Rom image with your favourite hex editor. You may find large recurring pieces of code/text dumped several times inside the same image (for example, search for TMR SEGA in the file, it should appear only once in a correct rom image), or large chunks filled with nothing but FFs for example. This is a pretty good indication the rom image is corrupt. * So it loads correctly and there appears to be an emulation problem. Try fiddling with the [F8] options. See later in the FAQ for some games that need a particular setting. * The palette is all wrong, or the screen is a funny size. This is due to an SMS game with an incorrect .GG extension, or a GG game with a .SMS extension. Rename it correctly. * OK, the problem is none of the above. Email the author, James McKay, or myself about it. -12------- Q. What are the emulation options in the [F8] screen for? What emulation options do I need for game "XXXXX"? A. Generally for 99% of games, you won't need to touch any of these options. However, some special cases are listed below: Altered Beast (SMS) Choose Line Interrupt Method 1 Gun Star Heroes (GG) Choose v0.5 defaults Donald Duck Lucky Dime (GG) Choose VBlank Optional Ninja Gaiden (GG) Choose VBlank Optional -13------- Q. Why do some games play scratchy white noise? A. This is speech, which is virtually impossible to emulate exactly. If you don't like it, try switching the white noise off in the menu, although this may not work if it isn't using the white noise channel. If you have a really fast emulation speed and switch on the PC speaker option, you can actually make out the sample properly. -14------- Q. What games have two player Gear-to-Gear support? A. Games with Gear-to-Gear support include: Aerial Assault Berlin Wall Buster Fight Columns Mean Bean Machine Dunk Kids Fatal Fury Special Joe Montana G-Loc GP Rider Hao Pai Hao Pai 2 Head Buster Mortal Kombat Mortal Kombat 2 Outrun Pacman Pop Breakers Popeye Power Rangers Puzlow Kids Riddick Bowe Ryu Kyu SD Hero Sonic Drift 2 Shanghai 2 Super Monaco GP Streets of Rage Streets of Rage 2 Super Wars-G Super Space Invaders Ultimate Soccer ... and probably loads more as yet untested. Just because a GG game is listed here, don't assume it works perfectly yet. -15------- Q. Which games contain separate English and Japanese versions? A. Quite a few SMS games behave differently depending which language mode you have Massage in - some simply put a "Sega Mark 3" message on the screen in Jap mode, while some games do have noticeably different versions depending on the mode. SMS games which simply have an added "Sega Mark 3 screen": Afterburner Alex Kidd Lost Stars Alien Syndrome Aztec Adventure Choplifter Fantasy Zone 2 Fantasy Zone Maze Galaxy Force Great Football Great Golf Kenseiden Kung Fu Kid Mah Jong Outrun Quartet R-Type Rocky Shinobi Slap Shot Space Harrier Super Tennis Thunderblade Time Soldiers Tri Formation SMS games with other language differences: Power Strike/Aleste Super/Wonder Boy Super/Wonder Boy in Monster Land World GP/The Circuit Zillion GG games have a language switch as well, which seems to be used very rarely. I haven't bothered checking all of the games, but one which seems to use it is Puzlow Kids. v0.61 doesn't use the GG language switch, but the next version might. -16------- Q. Why does the emulator take ages to start up now? A. There was a bug in v0.6 where if you had a fast machine of around P90 and above, the emulator could take 15 seconds or more to start up! This was due to a pretty poor linear search algorithm to find the correct delay settings. This has now been fixed in v0.61 and it should start up much more quickly. -17------- Q. Why does the file selector pop up straight away? Isn't there an internal Rom? A. If you don't specify a game on the command line the file selector pops up for you to load a game, because there is no default internal Rom. Apparently only the very first SMS's had an internal Rom with a little test game. Even if James had it, it wouldn't be allowed to be distributed. Maybe he'll write a little default test one in the future. -18------- Q. Why isn't my joystick correctly calibrated? A. Don't move it while Massage is starting up and it should calibrate fine. If you are piping output to a file (eg. c:\massage.exe > file.txt) you might also find it doesn't calibrate correctly - why are you piping output to a file anyway, eh? -19------- Q. Why doesn't modem play seem to work properly? Why does game "XXXXX" tell me to check the link? A. Gear-to-Gear mode is still not perfectly emulated, in case you hadn't guessed. There are a number of potential problems, such as the speed difference in the PCs where they can get out of sync, the modem speed, where it just can't keep up with the speed the emulator is sending out info, and unemulated GG ports which the game might be using. At the moment, unless both players have pretty powerful machines and a pretty fast link, the games will probably run pretty slowly. There is a little flashing pixel in the top-left of the screen which cycles through the palette colours when the link is active, if it sticks on a colour for a while deadlock has occurred between the machines. Try pressing a then escape to resolve the deadlock. You can always open the chat window with and check with your friend if problems are occurring. Another important point, when you finish the emulator, listen for the modem click if the line is hung up correctly - if it isn't, pull the phone plug or you may end up with a large phone bill! Modem play will be improved in future versions. -20------- Q. Why doesn't my saved game snap file work? A. It should work OK. Have you made sure the original Rom file was loaded first? It may be possible that if there was a pending interrupt, when you load the snap back in the screen may appear to be slightly corrupt, but it should resume normally 99% of the time. -21------- Q. Will Game Genie emulation be added? A. Probably in the next version. You'll just have to do with the Pro Action Replay for now. -22------- Q. Any plans for Novell networks or TCP/IP support for Gear-to-Gear games? A. Possibly Novell in the future, if there is demand and the Watcom Novell libraries can be found. TCP/IP games looks pretty complex and will probably not be fast enough, so not in the forseeable future. -23------- Q. What does the Japanese FM chip option do? A. There does seem to be a mysterious FM music chip that existed in some Japanese machines. A lot of games, especially from about 1986-1988 use it, and check for it even if the game isn't running in Japanese Mark 3 mode, so it must have been possible to have it in European and US machines as well. It is only partially emulated at the moment, as there is no technical information on even how many channels it has. Aztec Adventure on the SMS gives you access to a level select option if the chip is detected. In Massage it is switched off by default, but you can use the /fm switch if you want to check it out. -24------- Q. Where can I get cheats and tips on SMS and GG games? A. There are some in http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~dmckay/smcheat.zip. I suppose you'll just have to do net searches for others. -25------- Q. Any plans for a built in disassembler and monitor? A. Possibly. That empty [F9] key will have to be used for something. -26------- Q. Are there plans for ports of Massage to other platforms? A. Maybe. It is mostly written in C, although many parts are now being done in assembly, or are Dos specific. Still, it shouldn't be too hard to port. Maybe by v0.7 there will be versions for other platforms. -END------