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Shared High Score.dat?
Howard_Casto:
This topic in general, is a good idea. The only problem I see with it is where the hiscores are actually stored. In mame they cna be in the nvram, the cfg file and the hiscore or a combination of all 3. 40 games sounds impressive, but not if they are 40 games you don't like. ;)
I think the problem is being dealt with backwards. Mame needs to be fixed, not the hiscore.dat Right now mame lumps dipswitches, bookkeeping info and hiscores all in one file. The best soluiton would be to modify mame so that all of this data is slipt out into 3 files. Btw I'm not talking about nvram games.... these games have their storage proprely emulated, so we'd just have to leave them be.
bigmoe:
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on February 05, 2004, 09:05:38 am ---I think the problem is being dealt with backwards. Mame needs to be fixed, not the hiscore.dat Right now mame lumps dipswitches, bookkeeping info and hiscores all in one file. The best soluiton would be to modify mame so that all of this data is slipt out into 3 files. Btw I'm not talking about nvram games.... these games have their storage proprely emulated, so we'd just have to leave them be.
--- End quote ---
This really is the main problem, I agree. Given MAMEDEV's commitment to as close of emulation as possible, I'm guessing it would be a hard sell to the team (does this sound right, Howard?). But perhaps such a centralized system could be added as an option?
Howard_Casto:
Well that's the thing though.... with the exception of nvram, the information stored in the files is not arcade accurate at all....
For example, dipswitch settings aren't stored anywhere at all, they are a physical switch. (except for "soft dips" which are stored in nvram) So why were they lumped togther in the cfg file when they should be in a dipswitch file? Input is the same way.... There is no such thing as key definitions on a real cab, but once again they were lumped in the main cfg file. Ctrlr files are already in place, they should be finished so that this cfg nonsense can be phased out.
When you take out all of that junk then you have nothing in the cfg file but hi-scores. Now each game would probably save in a different format, but this is still dramatically easier to interface with.
Btw I'm not really complaining, I just don't understand why many of the primary mame devs waste time getting a state of the art game to run at 4fps while they could be helping R Belmont with much needed core changes. It seems to me that it'd make much more sense to fix some of these issues first.
RetroBorg:
Perhaps someone like Howard might know the answer to this question.
This guy here http://www.arcades.org.uk/ , hacks roms and adds top 5 high score tables to games like Galaxian, can these roms be downloaded and emulated by MAME so we can keep the top 5 scores?