Been away from MAME for some time and this HiToText seems pretty damn cool. Congrats
I didn't see Twin Cobra in the supported games list. Is it at all possible it will be supported ?
What could I do to help it get supported/cracked ?
There are thousands of games, and only a few hundred currently deciphered, so we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what HiToText will become. The best way to get a game you like supported is to first see if it's in the hiscore.dat. twincobr is! If a game is not in the hiscore.dat that means one of us would need to actually go into MAME's debugger and find the location in memory where the hi score tables are stored for that game, and create an entry before we could move on to the next step.
Now that we know a .hi file is generated we have a lot of options depending on the comfort level you have. I'll start from the easiest to hardest (IMO) ways to help. The first thing to do is get hi scores in the game and ensuring that you capture the most data that you can while doing so. For entering names, have all of the entries contain all of the different letters/numbers/symbols that are possible to enter. So you may have 5 scores, with names like: ABZ, 019, #$!, [](space), and ,.-
Now take a screenshot of the hi score screen, and take the .hi file generated, set them aside and either send them to me, or try and decipher the file yourself (more on that later). The .hi file is the same name of the rom name in the hi folder with a .hi extension added to it.
Two things to note about this, usually there is a pattern with letters and numbers so getting every single letter/number in the names is almost always a waste of time. With the name ABZ getting all 26 letters is possible, and with 019 getting all numbers is possible. Secondly, you may not be able to get all the possible characters into one high score table, so when you fill up the table with one set of scores save the .hi file, and screen shot, then fill up the table with another set of scores/names save the .hi file and screen shot, and repeat as necessary. Captain America took 3 separate.hi files because there were so many characters, but only 5 scores were saved.
Other games such as DoDonPachi have many other fields that need to be tracked, like the ship you used, the area you got to, the type of powerup used, etc... All of those things need to be deciphered as well. Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo had special characters as well that I needed to include. Anything that's saved, must be known. =)
Now, if you feel really comfortable with patterns and bytes you can try deciphering the .hi file. Some of the earlier posts with NOP and some of the later posts with Cananas show how this can be done. They open the .hi file in some sort of hex editor (I use WinHex) look at the bytes and try and find patterns. The more you do this the better you'll get at it, it also helps to know the manufacturer since they tend to store data in the same way per game. Marble Madness and Road Runner are great examples, Road Runner would have been difficult had Marble Madness not already been deciphered. Because I knew they were both Atari System 1 games I knew what to look for in Road Runner. A lot of the time the hex editor will help you out as well because many games encoded names and sometimes even scores in ASCII format, so frequently you'll see your names right away. From there it's only a matter of tracking the other data, scores are usually in literal format, BCD format, or hex. Things like rounds reached are usually one byte. Sometimes you will have to change the data, save the .hi file and rerun the game to see what changed in the hi score tables. I use this to save a lot of time in seeing what the game displays for areas reached. It's a pain to try and beat level 1-4 die, and then beat level 1-5, etc... By finding and modifying the level byte(s) I can usually crack this in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours.
If you've got the .hi file deciphered and figured out what every byte does or doesn't do (some bytes do not affect the scores), and you think you can help even more you can always write the actual code module used in HiToText. The source is completely open, and if you can code, I would recommend picking it up. All of the games follow the same basic format so you can usually run through some existing game that's similiar to the game you're deciphering and use that as a baseline. Running through the code for a game should give you an idea of what's necessary. Some games are much more complicated than others and have different features: Track and field also keeps track of "alternate" scores: 100m dash, javelin throw, etc... Other games like Centipede actually read and write two different files. If you feel really comfortable programming, take a look at these if the game you want to decipher is complicated.
Getting through any of the above steps is help, and with thousands more games to decipher, we can use all the help we can get. I'm always glad to hear from people who enjoy HiToText. =)