FBNeo high score saving trouble

mitu

I was playing The King of Dragons (kod) recently and noticed the hiscore is not saved.
The game has a hiscore.dat entry and I - briefly - checked the driver and it looks to have hiscore enabled, but there's no .hi file created. I checked with Mame (245) and it seems to behave similarly - no hiscores file is created.

barbudreadmon

@mitu the entry in hiscore.dat is probably wrong, imho kod is mistakenly grouped with kodr1 while it should be grouped with kodj. It's probably the same situation than ryujin, where original kod became kodr1 at some point.

mitu

@barbudreadmon said in FBNeo high score saving trouble:

It's probably the same situation than ryujin, where original kod became kodr1 at some point.

OK, I'll give it a shot with the kodj hiscore values.

EDIT: yes, you were right, moving the kod: entry next to kodj: saves the hiscore on exit.

WeirdH

@barbudreadmon Found another one: matchit2

EDIT: both aforementioned ryujin and kod fixes worked for me as well, thanks!

barbudreadmon

@WeirdH said in FBNeo high score saving trouble:

matchit2

I'd really prefer those requests to be limited to games existing in hiscore.dat and/or games whose hiscores were confirmed as persistent in current MAME, as i won't be able to do much about their hiscores otherwise.

This one doesn't exist in hiscore.dat, does it save hiscores somehow in current MAME ?

WeirdH

@barbudreadmon said in FBNeo high score saving trouble:

I'd really prefer those requests to be limited to games existing in hiscore.dat and/or games whose hiscores were confirmed as persistent in current MAME, as i won't be able to do much about their hiscores otherwise.

That's cool, I assumed you'd want to know about any game that didn't work, but I'll check them first from now on.

This one doesn't exist in hiscore.dat, does it save hiscores somehow in current MAME ?

Tested with Mame2003-Plus and it does not. It's also not present in the hiscore.dat, so I guess that checks out.

barbudreadmon

@WeirdH said in FBNeo high score saving trouble:

Tested with Mame2003-Plus and it does not. It's also not present in the hiscore.dat, so I guess that checks out.

I'd really recommend testing on current MAME, since MAME2003-Plus is less likely to be using the same dump (cf. ryujin or kod), but i suppose knowing hiscores worked sometime in the past can be helpful too.

On that note, following your request on shangon some time ago, i confirm the shangon2 entry in hiscore.dat is not meant for a modern shangon2 romset, it's actually meant for old bootlegs that were renamed long ago and that we don't even emulate in FBNeo (MAME2003-Plus is still using one of those bootlegs as shangon2). The good news is that i finally figured out how to save shangon's hiscores through nvram so we don't need the hiscore.dat entry anymore

WeirdH

@barbudreadmon said in FBNeo high score saving trouble:

I'd really recommend testing on current MAME

That's a little trickier, as I don't really have an easy way of testing that right now. How current does it need to be? I might be able to get something working on an old pc I have lying around.

The good news is that i finally figured out how to save shangon's hiscores through nvram so we don't need the hiscore.dat entry anymore

That's wonderful! Is the update live yet?

barbudreadmon

@WeirdH said in FBNeo high score saving trouble:

How current does it need to be?

The more recent, the better, since we are using the same dumps as latest MAME.
I think there is a script to install latest standalone MAME on retropie ? There are also MAME linux binaries (including arm and aarch64) available from https://stickfreaks.com/mame/, i suppose they are somehow official since i saw mamehaze linking them multiple times.
Standalone is probably a better option than the libretro core for current MAME.

@WeirdH said in FBNeo high score saving trouble:

That's wonderful! Is the update live yet?

Yes

mitu

@barbudreadmon said in FBNeo high score saving trouble:

I think there is a script to install latest standalone MAME on retropie ?

Yes, there's a package that installs latest MAME binary release (0.245, the June release).

sirhenrythe5th

just found another one: "King of Dragons" by Capcom (kod.zip) ;)

barbudreadmon

@sirhenrythe5th see https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/279645

sirhenrythe5th

@barbudreadmon oh, ok! sorry for double-posting, i did not have this in memory!

WeirdH

@barbudreadmon Might have found another one. It's mentioned in the hiscore.dat at least. The game is uopoko.

barbudreadmon

@WeirdH support added

WeirdH

~~@barbudreadmon metamrpj doesn't save scores for me in Mame2003-plus, but the code mentioned in hiscore.dat seems to be similar on both FBneo and M3+:~~

FBN @:maincpu,program,203240,35,00,5a
M3+ 0:203240:35:00:5a

~~Does this mean both cores are accessing the same "hiscore-place"? (you can see by my technical lingo how knowledgable I am about this function)~~

~~And if so, is there a way I can update the M3+ datfile to work? (as my Pi3 is too slow to adequately run the game on FBN, unfortunately)~~

~~Or should I open a new thread for this question?~~

EDIT: I just noticed that the M3+ datfile mentions the game as metamrphj, but clrmamepro gives me an M3+ file named metamrpj, which appears to be the old name.

So is the M3+ datfile referencing the wrong name?

EDIT 2: Yes, it is. I just removed the 'h' in the datfile as a test and now the game saves scores. Should I report this somewhere?

barbudreadmon

@WeirdH said in FBNeo high score saving trouble:

Should I report this somewhere?

The hiscore homepage is at https://highscore.mameworld.info/, you can send emails to the author.

WeirdH

@barbudreadmon Been a while, found another: retofinv