NBA JAM Save?!?!

[Avenger257]

I have looked through the site and found one post on this but it doesn't appear to answer the question???

My question is this:

Can you save your season/initials in NBA Jam.  The other post that I saw was talking about compiling MAME and it suggested using the HI Score diff (?) but when I look at what is saves, it doesn't appear to work with NBA Jams or similar games... can someone help me make sense of this?  I absolutely love this game and would love to unlock the hidden characters/seasons etc and would appreciate any help...

[Finchbyrd]

You can use mame's save state feature, google that because I don't know much about it. I know you can save it and load it to continue from that point later, but I don't know if you have to manually load it every time, or if you can have it save automatically when you close the game.

[Beretta]

hiscore diff was a patch to save high score tables on games that dont normally save high score table on power off, like pacman and such.

games like NBA Jam however are saved with whats called NVram, or "Nonvolatile Ram"
it's contents are saved via a battery..

in mame however there it's saved using a file..

check your mame.ini make sure it's saving a file in the "NVRAM" directory.

[Endaar]

Saves work fine in NBA Jam: TE. I believe I have auto save-state on.

[Avenger257]

Well I have the file in NVRAM but it is still not working.  Can anyone point me to where I can find more information on this?

I read up on the save state feature but I am unsure how I can make this work without using the keyboard (shift+f7).  Is there a way to automatically save using command line MAME?

[Beretta]

what version of mame are you running? are you using the official build or a variation?

[Endaar]

I've got a self-compiled version of .133 with the hiscore diff applied. Other than that it's a standard build.

[Beretta]

id say something went wrong with the compile.. try the official build from mamedev.net and see if does the same thing.

[u_rebelscum]

I'm not sure if NBA Jam saved the season to NVRAM or not.  If it did, (IOW if the original cab saved seasons over a turn off/on cycle), you don't need autosave and mame should be saving the season without you doing anything.  If the game didn't save the season to NVRAM, then you do need to enable autoave. 

If you need the state to be saved automatically, enable -autosave in mame.ini (or for just that game, use nbajam.ini with just "autosave 1" in it). 


FWIW, nbajam is listed as supporting autosave (not all games do), so the -autosave option should work.  If a game doesn't support autosave, mame disables the option for that game.  To find out if a game supports autosave, use mame's -listxml option:  "mame -lx > listxml.xml" will save all games to the file listed, while "mame -lx nbajam" willl output all the info on just nbajam to the screen.  Near the end of the info on each game, you'll see "savestate=" followed by either "supported" or "unsupported".

[Beretta]

yes nbajam saved season info to nvram in real life.. it does so in mame as well.

there is no need for hiscore patch or save states on nba jam.

[Endaar]

MINE works fine, heh. Clearly it's the savestate though, not the hiscore compile.