Compiling MAME

[jardine]

Short question: I want to add high score support to v.123 of mame...do i need to compile mame to do this?

Long Question: Compiling mame looks to me to be making your own version of mame of sorts. If i already have v.123 on my pc why would i want to compile mame, would this add another version of mame or would i be compiling v.123? Sure it might give me a better understanding of the work that goes into mame, but effectivley all i want to add to mame at this stage is high score support as stated above.

Please help a newbie grasp a better understanding of why we compile?

[Minwah]

Short question: I want to add high score support to v.123 of mame...do i need to compile mame to do this?

Short answer: yes

Long Question: Compiling mame looks to me to be making your own version of mame of sorts. If i already have v.123 on my pc why would i want to compile mame, would this add another version of mame or would i be compiling v.123? Sure it might give me a better understanding of the work that goes into mame, but effectivley all i want to add to mame at this stage is high score support as stated above.

You want to compile Mame because you want to add hiscore support...sounds like you don't have any other reason. You would just be doing a 'custom compile' of Mame v0.123.

Please help a newbie grasp a better understanding of why we compile?

Most people do it purely to add things that the official Mame doesn't do, or to take things out that the official Mame does do (eg nag screens).

[IDDQD]

It sounds like you want to be compiling this using this.

[TxGlenn]

You may already know this and I could be wrong as I am still researching getting my high scores to save as well but...

From what I've read, high score saving is only supported by those games that had some mechanism to save the high scores upon cabinet power-off.  I downloaded MAMEUIFX and the high-scoring saving worked in Zookeeper.  But most of the games I was wanting to save, DK, Pacman, etc. were not able to save high scores.  I read where we could try doing a "save state" where you effectively just save the game as you're quitting out of it and then you need to "load saved state" when you want to play again.  This didn't sound very seemless to me, especially using a UI version of MAME.  Maybe I'm wrong?

Also, doing the save state method, your scores will end up getting wiped out if you upgrade your version of MAME later on.

Someone please correct me if any of this is wrong.  This is all still new to me and some of what I'm reading may already be outdated.

[TheShanMan]

If you compile in hiscore support and download hiscore.dat, (many) games which lost high scores on power off will not suffer that problem in mame (including DK and pacman).