Kong crash update: Fixing corrupt hi score files?

[notbillcosby]

I've been playing the crap out of the Donkey Kong (US Set 1) rom over the past week or two. It was running fine earlier today even. I turned the computer back on tonight and launched the game, and now I have rows of jibberish numbers at the top of the screen, the game is unresponsive to input, and it plays the "dying sound" from the game over and over. Also, the video settings appeared to have been reset.

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?? I backed up and deleted the dkong.ini file from the ini folder with no luck, and then backed up and deleted the dkong.zip rom file and replaced it with one pulled from a .rar file, also fixing nothing. What else can I remove/replace/update that might've gotten corrupted somehow? What's extra annoying is that the other sets seem to work. US Set 2 runs fine... But man, Set 1 is where all my high scores were saved! Hmm... I spose there's probably a high score file somewhere. I wonder if that's the culprit...

[notbillcosby]

Gahddammit, it was. It was dkong.hi that when removed... caused Donkey Kong to run again. NO! I luckily have a photo of my high score screen as it last was... is there some way to edit these hi score files? Can i un-corrupt the old one somehow?

[notbillcosby]

I found a tutorial that actually seems like it'd be pretty easy, just I don't have mame compiled with the debugger option on. Anyone wanna help out, or do I need to figure out how to recompile with the debugger turned on?

Here's the tutorial:
http://highscore.mameworld.info/tutorial.htm

[Jumpman64]

Sorry I cannot offer any help but just wanted to say I feel your pain.  I don't know how but I lost my DK high scores just the other day myself.  Not really sure how.  I had been messing with some parameters related to screen resolution while playing with the miniSLG, and then I loaded up DK and my scores were just gone. 

[dna disturber]

Although the HiToText project is somewhat dead you can still use it to insert scores in the hiscore files.
Using the commandline you can enter scores.
Just search for hitotext , it should work.

Dna disturber 

P.s this problem could happen if you use the hiscore patch and savestate at the same time..