MAME 2010 High Scores?

Alturis

Was trying to track down where the .hi files or equivalent are stored for MAME 2010 emulated games. fba and mame2003 are pretty straight forward but even doing a search with linux locate after a fresh updatedb its not finding any files that look similar for mame2010.

It seems like these must be the nvram/<game>.nv files I am guessing. (non volatile ram files) But looking at the contents of some of these it is hard to see how it could possibly be storing anything meaningful.

feversos.nv is about 95% just ff ff ff ff for example.

Or gigawing.nv which stores the top 20 scores or so with other metadata per score. There is nowhere near enough data in that nv file for all that.

markwkidd

Right now mame2010 does not have support for saving hiscores. I'm in the process of adding it to the core and I'm pretty sure it will be successful based on preliminary results.

Give me another two or three weeks and I should know for sure.

Once it's working there will be .hi files stored in a subdirectory called hi within the mame2010 libretro save directory (in RetroPie, aka the folder where you have your ROMs).

dankcushions

.nv files will be storing cabinet settings, i think. not hi scores, unless the cabinet itself had some kind of non-volatile hiscore memory (most early arcade machines lost everything once the power was off)

markwkidd

@mediamogul if you would like to try making your Gorf scores persistent between sessions and you would like to spend some quality time compiling mame2010, I have submitted a PR that adds hiscore support: https://github.com/libretro/mame2010-libretro/pull/100

I notice that Gorf does have an entry in the hiscore database. 8-)

There is a backlog in the libretro buildbot due to server upgrades, so it might be a few days before Twinaphex merges the PR there.

Alturis

@dankcushions said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

unless the cabinet itself had some kind of non-volatile hiscore memory

I noticed that Joust stores its high scores in the .nv file even with mame2003. But I havent yet cracked exactly how. I can tell from the pattern of memory that it clearly matches up with what is shown in the high scores table but there is some weird byte swapping going on.

markwkidd

@alturis said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

@dankcushions said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

unless the cabinet itself had some kind of non-volatile hiscore memory

I noticed that Joust stores its high scores in the .nv file even with mame2003. But I havent yet cracked exactly how. I can tell from the pattern of memory that it clearly matches up with what is shown in the high scores table but there is some weird byte swapping going on.

It's possible that the original Joust machine had memory onboard to save high scores. In that case it would make sense that it saves to .nv. I wouldn't know on that one. The .hiis for games that lost their memory when unplugged or reset.

mediamogul

@markwkidd

Very keen! It'll be great to have a record of my conquests against the evil Gorfian Empire. I'll keep an eye out for it to get merged. Thanks man.

Alturis

I also wanted to clarify that my interest in editing high scores in no way implies I am interested in cheating. ;)

There are various games that come with a set of default high scores that I would like to clear out so that the high score table is more reflective of the highest achievements ever accomplished on this particular machine.

markwkidd

@mediamogul said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

Very keen! It'll be great to have a record of my conquests against the evil Gorfian Empire. I'll keep an eye out for it to get merged. Thanks man.

:) Next up -- and hopefully last -- is trying to finish adding support for players 3-5. After that I swear I will leave mame2010 for a while to let people tinker and find new bugs.

maxbeanz

@markwkidd said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

@mediamogul said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

Very keen! It'll be great to have a record of my conquests against the evil Gorfian Empire. I'll keep an eye out for it to get merged. Thanks man.

:) Next up -- and hopefully last -- is trying to finish adding support for players 3-5. After that I swear I will leave mame2010 for a while to let people tinker and find new bugs.

Slightly off topic but was the aspect ratio problem with vertical games fixed ? I asked in a different thread but no-one actually confirmed it. I hate playing games in stretched aspect and having to manually change them one by one. :)

dankcushions

@maxbeanz the issue is still open: https://github.com/libretro/mame2010-libretro/issues/20

however there was PR that seems to address this: https://github.com/libretro/mame2010-libretro/pull/48

just try it??

maxbeanz

@dankcushions I will when I have time, I just wondered if anyone who's using lr-mame2010 now can confirm that it's actually fixed. This will save me the 1 hour + of building from source.

markwkidd

The hiscore patch has been merged.

Alturis

@markwkidd Awesome! Do you still have a short list of things we should hold off on before we make the switch?

markwkidd

As far as I know there is only one reason to wait: There are at least a few games which are segfaulting now after the directory relocation project. Or more precisely after the new code was introduced for the new directories.

How one could cause the other is beyond me, but I am working on it. It may take some time. I've started a github issue to track this: https://github.com/libretro/mame2010-libretro/issues/101

To put it another way, there are hopefully many more games that are not going to crash because of the directory issue but it's still early in testing.

The only other major change I'm planning to implement soon is 4-player support. Other than that I'm just looking for the one bug we know of and anything else that crops up as result of my updates. :)

mediamogul

@markwkidd

You're really whipping 2010 into fighting condition. Well done, sir!

markwkidd

@mediamogul said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

@markwkidd

You're really whipping 2010 into fighting condition. Well done, sir!

After you say such a nice thing I hate to report that Gorf does not seem to be saving hiscores despite its entry in hiscore.dat. Maybe there is a fix or update that can be applied for Gorf though. Hope springs.

mediamogul

@markwkidd said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

I hate to report that Gorf does not seem to be saving hiscores

See, now we can't be friends anymore. In fact, according to internet law, I'm now required to claim that you're worse than Hitler. All kidding aside, I'm just glad we have a core that'll run the game with the voice samples. Keep up the great work. It's much appreciated.

Riverstorm

@mediamogul said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

See, now we can't be friends anymore. In fact, according to internet law, I'm now required to claim that you're worse than Hitler.

Priceless!

markwkidd

@mediamogul said in MAME 2010 High Scores?:

See, now we can't be friends anymore. In fact, according to internet law, I'm now required to claim that you're worse than Hitler. All kidding aside, I'm just glad we have a core that'll run the game with the voice samples. Keep up the great work. It's much appreciated.

:) :)

I'm not positive what this comment in hiscore.dat means, but I have a feeling it might be related to the Gorf issue:

;********astrocde.c
gorf: ;* resetting screws up 2 scores and top score
gorfpgm1:
0:d010:22:00:00

I checked the MAME 2003, MAME 2014, and MAME 2016 hiscore.dat but they're using the same hiscore memory map. :(