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Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: mike5im5 on June 20, 2018, 10:40:17 am

Title: Reading .nv files
Post by: mike5im5 on June 20, 2018, 10:40:17 am

Hi All,

I'm a bit new to the software side of emulations and wondered if someone could help explain a few things to me?

I wanted a way to extract and share high scores between my brother and I playing on two different systems (he lives on the other side of the world). I recently built him a pi3 based gameboy and it will be really good for us to get competitive on some old coin ups (track and field, galaga, 1942 etc).

I'm a competent C++/java programmer so writing a utility to upload the data to a web server and hosting it with a nice front end would be easy enough for me.

However my binary/hex knowledge is very thin.

Can someone tell me if it's even possible or point me in the right direction? I'm assuming that save data should be in the .nv file somewhere so as long as I could find references to where this is. I could extract and interpret it in some way.

Questions:

1. Does the format/content of the .nv file change between different versions of mame?
2. Should I be using the highscore.dat and .hi files instead? Is this even supported?
3. Will the highscore.dat point me in the right direction in terms of where high score values are kept? Can anyone explain to me the format of the highscore.dat?
4. Is there already another service already doing all of this and am I wasting my time?

Many thanks for anyone that could enlighten me. Much appreciated!

Title: Re: Reading .nv files
Post by: Mike A on June 20, 2018, 10:57:41 am

You could text him your score. :dunno

Title: Re: Reading .nv files
Post by: mike5im5 on June 20, 2018, 11:02:30 am

Quote from: Mike A on June 20, 2018, 10:57:41 am

You could text him your score. :dunno

Did I mention I'm a geek that loves to build/over engineer everything?  8)

Seriously though, assuming you're just light hearted kidding as I kinda figured this forum was here for like minded individuals who liked to build things?

Title: Re: Reading .nv files
Post by: headkaze on June 20, 2018, 09:10:45 pm

Check out HiToText (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,83614.0.html) and hi2txt (http://greatstone.free.fr/hi2txt/).

Title: Re: Reading .nv files
Post by: mike5im5 on June 21, 2018, 03:20:53 am

Quote from: headkaze on June 20, 2018, 09:10:45 pm

Check out HiToText (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,83614.0.html) and hi2txt (http://greatstone.free.fr/hi2txt/).

Awesome. That's great.. so looking at these it should be possible to read directly from the nv files. However an additional definition is required additional to the hiscore.dat.

Thanks!

Title: Re: Reading .nv files
Post by: mike5im5 on June 21, 2018, 08:45:06 am

I'm having a bit of trouble with hi2txt.

I can get it working with .hi files. However I can't seem to get it to work with the nvram files directly. Games like track & field don't seem to generate .hi files so was hoping to extract the high scores directly form the nv file.

Has anyone achieved this with hi2txt? The descrription implies it might be possible but I can't find any docs describing how?