Games with High Score lists.

[jelwell]

I've been playing competitively on my arcade cabinet against a few friend's cabinets. (We have our hi and nvram directories mounted on a remote server that we share.) However we're running out of classic arcade games to play that:
1) Have a high score list with Names/Initials
2) Don't allow continuing.

I did some searching and it seems pretty easy to tie down the continuing aspect. I can just limit the number of credits to something like 4. I think the best way would be to allow as many credits as desired but disable highscores when the credits entered is above 4 or so. I already wrote some code that disables high scores when Load is pressed. So I presume I can leverage the same code to disable High scores after a handful of credit inserts.

Here are some alternative ways to limit credits:
Coin Limiter program
Wire up a coin door

However games that don't have a "continue" would be preferable, since they're usually designed for 1 Quarter anyways. It would be kind of silly to compete over a Metal Slug score... The game just isn't really designed for that.

Also finding a list of (classic) games that have a high score list is difficult. Games like Pooyan, Crystal Castles, and Joust are perfect. However PacMan and Frogger only keep the top score and don't allow initials to be entered.

Anyone have a list? Or suggestions?
Joseph Elwell.

[Veinman]

I suppose the honor system is out of the question?

[MustardTent]

Well, I know that you can just look though hiscore.dat for all the games that support .hi files.  You can just "grep" for the games that you're interested in.  Look through the various lists online (don't have a link just now) for the most popular games or whatever, and use that as your "grepping" list. 

As far as games that store hiscore data in nvram, I don't have a clue.

A fellow BYOAC'er and I have been working on something that some FE authors may be interested in concerning .hi files...

[arcadegamenut]

I know of at least one game that stores the hi score data in both places. I found out by accident because I exited the game too quickly (?).

Here  was the scenario:

1. Default Dig Dug has 5 scores each of them being 10,000.

2. Played until I reached about 15,000 and let the game end.

3. Exited out too quick (?).

Now according to the hi file the score should have been the 15,000, but every time I loaded the game, it didn't have it, but still maintained the original score.

So I started nosing around the nv file and noticed that it too had hi score data as well.

To fix my problem, I just deleted both files and played again.

pkurby1 is correct in that you can use the hiscore.dat file (if you have the latest one) to get a lot of information.

And what's this FE secret he speaks of?

[jelwell]

I suppose the honor system is out of the question?

HAH! One friend has already admitted to save/loading.

Has anyone else tackled cheating in MAME? I'm not terribly concerned that my friends will hex edit the .hi or nvram files since that's a bit beyond their means/desire. But am I missing other in game cheats that are easy to do?

Possible cheating ares:
save/load - covered
cheat.dat (this is actually handled automatically by MAME)
dip switches - I haven't really done anything about this yet. Ideas?

I just emailed the maintainers of Naked Arcade for a copy of their MAME source changes. Let's see if they will comply with the MAME license. I think they verify INP files.
Joseph Elwell.