Error: Cannot open message file

[Qun Mang]

Okay. I understand from reading this board that running SSF is a bit iffy. So far no one has mentioned this error though. Any ideas? I tried extracting the SSF archive into a subdirectory in my emulation\sega folder and also in the root directory. I have a boot.rom that is 524,288 bytes in size in the same directory as SSF, but I don't think the emulator is even getting far enough to check, or is trying to give me a real error but for some reason cannot find the message file, which is plainly in the folder it was extracted to (Message\English and Message\Japanese). I am trying to run it on a P4/3.0Ghz computer with integrated Intel GFX and 1GB of RAM.

[Example]

I tried two things last night that got the errors to go away, and the games playing! Maybe it'll help....

1) Your BIOS have to be unzipped in the same folder as your SSF app. I noticed that the zipped US BIOS is named Sega_100.bin (Japanese is Sega_101.bin), but when I unzipped, it would capitalize and turn into SEGA_100.bin and SEGA_101.bin. By renaming these back to lower-case, I never saw a BIOS error again.

2) In the Settings menu, the country matches the BIOS used. I noticed that when there was a mismatch only the Saturn CD menu would appear, but if I had SSF pointing to the Japan BIOS with Japan selected...Virtua Fighter 2 worked.

If these two steps are the key to playing these games, and you're getting your games from torrents or emu sites, you probably won't know what BIOS correspond to your game. This will probably involve trial and error, where you try each BIOS for a game until you get a match. And then, label the file appropriately for me to get!! :bouncy:

Well, I'm off to try and prove this hypothesis. We shall see...

A.

[Qun Mang]

I don't even know if there's a BIOS problem. It never says. I guess I shouldn't have included BIOS info in my post above. The only error it gives me is Cannot open message file. I click Okay and the emulator closes. As far as the message file goes, it seems to work fine on my other computer (stats below) as it actually gives me a real SSF error (There is no SSE. Athlon T-birds don't even have SSE let alone SSE2).

Could I be missing a required DLL on the Pentium 4 machine?

[Example]

I guess I should have mentioned that I was getting that message error, too. What I've picked up on, after having SSF perform a force close each time that I don't understand the error, is that it's something BIOS-related.

Although I got the BIOS and Message error to begin with, everything was fine after I followed the above steps. It may have given me the error ONE more time, but then it worked.

Try these steps, and tell me if it's still happening to you.

A.

[Qun Mang]

I tried your step 1, but I still get the error when starting SSF. I now have boot.rom (copy of sega_101.bin), sega_100.bin, and sega_101.bin in the same directory as SSF.exe. I cannot try step 2 since there is no settings menu. The only menu is the file menu which gives me only two options, Snapshot and Exit. I am going to try a dial-a-fix program I downloaded the other day with common fixes to missing files and whatnot. I'm sure I'm missing something- I just wish I knew what.

[Example]

What version of SSF are you using?

I'm using the recently released SSF 007 Beta R1.

A.

[Qun Mang]

That's the one. I also tried the "fix" version mentioned in another post.

[soccerboi]

SSF beta for some reason doesn't work on a lot of peoples computers, including mine. Just keep trying the new versions.

Try getting 0.7 alpha r13 to work first though, and tell us the results.

[PsyMan]

Only two things I can think about... Either you're missing one of the required files (try redownloading SSF) or you placed the emulator on a weird path (try placing the emulator to c:\SSF).

If it isn't one of the above... maybe you're missing a required dll. I can't tell. :(

[Qun Mang]

Alpha R13 does the same thing. I also opened SSF.exe with a text editor (fortunately SSF.exe didn't appear to be compressed) and did a search for the .DLL files mentioned in it. The only one I was missing from my system32 directory was WNASPI32.DLL. I copied it over from my Nero 6 directory to c:\SSF (where I put SSF by PsyMans's recommendation) and it didn't help either.

Oh well. No SSF for me I guess. Maybe in another several releases, that is if I can somehow get this apparent bug report to the author.

[Example]

Don't feel too badly about this. Although I've gotten quite a few games to load, only two or three of them actually play. Even the play is extremely choppy and lagging like crazy. You're not missing out on anything....

However, my BIOS theory is so far correct after testing 11 games today. SSF will only accept the game if the proper country BIOS are pointed to and the corresponding country is selected.

A.

[soccerboi]

Well that's because you don't have a new enough computer. Saturn games work perfect on my computer and the compatability is at least 80%, probably more.

[Example]

*sniff* Stop picking on my computer....:)

A.