Convert Hiscore diff to LUA Hiscore

[EMDB]

Question: is the new lua hiscore system compatible with the old patched version? In other words will my current hi-scores still be available once I switch to lua?

Yes, it is compatible.

Edit: At least for the games I have tried, quite a lot.

How exactly does it work?

1) I downloaded and extracted mame0180b_64bit.exe. This contained a plugins folder with the hiscore lua script. 
2) I Launched mame64.exe and enabled the hiscore plugin.
3) I copied my previous hiscore.dat to the plugins\hiscore folder (there was already a hiscore.dat file there).
4) Then I launched mame64.exe with dkong for which I had hiscores in V0.177 with the hiscores patch. No hiscores showed up. I played a game and made a new hiscore. Exited mame and restarted: no hiscores

 

[EMDB]

Figured it out thanks to a PM. In fact it was quite easy with the native LUA hiscore support in the original build.

1) compile MAME 0.180 with the suppression diff with MameCompiler64.
2) extract plugins folder from mame0180b_64bit.exe.
3) run MAME and enable hiscore LUA plugin
4) copy the full mame/hi folder from the original MAME with hiscore diff patched environment.
5) launch MAME with your favorite game. Game on.