Network high scores?

[electricd]

Hello,

I am working on a project which will involve 3 MAME cabinets.  Each one will be identical in design and software.  My idea is to have all 3 share the same hiscores folder so that if someone sets the high score on donkey kong on cab 1, then it will display that score across all 3 cabs.  I checked the folder and it seems like it is only about 900k large after about a year of playing games.  Can MAME work with mapped drives, or better yet with UNC paths?  I was thinking of just copying that folder to the server, and then having the mame.ini files on each machine address the directory on the server via either UNC or mapped drives.  Has anyone tried this, and if so is it possible?  Thanks in advance!

ED7

[cholin]

Ill bet its possible one way or another, youll probably need a synchronizing server in there that gets the data, checks which one is newer on each machine, then sends each machine the newest files.

[electricd]

Right, well what if there wasn't any synchronizing to do.  What if they just shared files.  The only problem I would see with this is if someone is playing the SAME game on 2 or more cabs at the same time. 

[ddockery]

Well assuming you're in XP and you just map the drives, MAME won't know the difference.  The mapping is at the OS level, so if you set the highscores dir to Z: (or whatever) and that's mapped it should work fine.  As you mentioned, multiple cabs playing the same game could be an issue.  I don't know if using a hiscore file locks it down or not.

[screaming]

Well assuming you're in XP and you just map the drives, MAME won't know the difference.  The mapping is at the OS level, so if you set the highscores dir to Z: (or whatever) and that's mapped it should work fine.  As you mentioned, multiple cabs playing the same game could be an issue.  I don't know if using a hiscore file locks it down or not.

  That's not entirely true.. I don't know why, but MAME never worked for me through a UNC path or even a mapped drive.

  Anyway, your biggest problem in syncing them is to be aware when the high score file might be in use.  KiXtart might offer such a function for you..

-sab