High score persistence on 20pacgal

bengalsfan88

I am using a Pi 3 with RetroPie v4.5.1 from the premade image. I am using the lr-fbneo emulator to run the 20th Anniversary edition of Ms. PacMan and Galaga (20pacgal). 20pacgal is the only ROM I have on it and is the only game I want to run.

I am having trouble getting high scores to persist across reboots. After searching ~/RetroPie/BIOS/fbneo/hiscore.dat I did not find any references to 20pacgal, leading me to believe that it may not be supported.

Can anyone confirm that high score saving is impossible for this ROM? I have read that some people use save states to save high scores, but unless this method can be configured to require no user input, it is not an option for me.

If anything is unclear, please ask and I'll try to clarify.
Thank you.

barbudreadmon

@bengalsfan88 said in High score persistence on 20pacgal:

leading me to believe that it may not be supported.

You are right, if it doesn't exist in hiscore.dat then it's not supported natively by emulators. I might be wrong but the fact there are 2 hiscore boards in this romset might be the bottleneck here.

@bengalsfan88 said in High score persistence on 20pacgal:

I have read that some people use save states to save high scores, but unless this method can be configured to require no user input

There is a retroarch setting for auto load/save indeed, go into Settings > Saving and toggle Auto Save State & Auto Load State. I don't recommend to do this globally so you might consider creating an override specifically for this game

bengalsfan88

My understanding of the auto save setup is that it only saves when the emulator exits normally, correct? So if the power was cut everything would be lost. Do you know of a way to save the state at an interval, every 10 minutes for instance? I see there is an autosave_interval setting which seems encouraging.

Thanks!

barbudreadmon

@bengalsfan88 said in High score persistence on 20pacgal:

So if the power was cut everything would be lost.

Indeed, the same would probably apply for hiscores even if they were natively supported by the emulator.

@bengalsfan88 said in High score persistence on 20pacgal:

Do you know of a way to save the state at an interval, every 10 minutes for instance? I see there is an autosave_interval setting which seems encouraging.

Afaik that setting is for normal saves only (things like memory card & the likes).

In those conditions, what you want to do is probably impossible.

dankcushions

@bengalsfan88 said in High score persistence on 20pacgal:

My understanding of the auto save setup is that it only saves when the emulator exits normally, correct? So if the power was cut everything would be lost. Do you know of a way to save the state at an interval, every 10 minutes for instance? I see there is an autosave_interval setting which seems encouraging.

Thanks!

note that if you’re cutting the power to your raspberry pi you have more things to worry about than hi scores; eventually your SD card will corrupt and your entire installation will be lost. don’t cut the power!

bengalsfan88

Bummer that there seems to be no way to do this.

I don't plan on cutting power without doing a normal shutdown regularly, but accidental unplugging is definitely a risk in my use case.

Thank you for the help!