MESS currently uses Subversion as version control system. Read only access is available for anonymous users and write access for developers. You can either use the standard command line version of Subversion, or (if you are on Windows) the excellent TortoiseSVN front-end.
You can also download the current sources using GIT if you are behind a firewall and can't access the subversion repository. The URL is http://git.toseciso.org/mess.git. Just type
> git clone http://git.toseciso.org/mess.git
to download.
Gitweb has also been installed to browse the sources or view commits.
Open a command prompt and change to the directory where you want to keep the sources. Then enter the following command:
> svn checkout svn://messdev.fdns.net/mess/
This will create a directory named ”mess” and download the current revision of the MESS source code. You don't need to re-download everything if you want to update it; change to the mess directory and use this command to just download the changed files:
> svn update
Install TortoiseSVN and open the directory where you want to store MESS, for example C:\. Right click to get the Windows context menu and select SVN Checkout. A window will open like the one on the screenshot to the right where you can select the repository and destination. Enter svn://messdev.fdns.net/mess as URL and under Checkout directory the directory where TortoiseSVN should download the sources too, for example C:\mess. Click OK to start the download. When it's finished, you will have the complete source of MAME and MESS in the folder you specified.
If you later want to update the sources to the current version, open the folder where you stored the sources (in our example, C:\mess), right click and select SVN Update. TortoiseSVN will now update your sources to the current version.