Mame 108 already...

[usedelectronics]

http://www.mamedev.org

[Havok]

Got it - it could be just me, but savestate seems to work a little better...

[Tiger-Heli]

Looks like hiscore support was removed, although I can't confirm this.

[Tiger-Heli]

Did some more digging.  Hi-Score support was removed in 107u1, but they never announced it.

As I understand it the plan is for "Automatic Save States" to replace this - so when you exit a game it remembers what state it was in, and when you re-start, it starts at this point.

Does anyone know how/if this is working?  Alternately, does anyone know of a derivative build that will maintain the previous system?

[Havok]

Save state does work - for some games. I tested it, and it even saved right in the middle of a sound in Tron! When I started back up, it played the last part!

MKChamp did a diff file for 107 to add hiscore back, plus a few other things, located here:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=56259.msg553170#msg553170

[Tiger-Heli]

Thanks - New questions:  Is there a list somewhere of what games support auto-save state and/or NVRAM?  Also, if I enable auto-save state in the mame.ini, does this cause problems for games that don't support it?

Thanks again!!!

[MKChamp]

Thanks - New questions:  Is there a list somewhere of what games support auto-save state and/or NVRAM?  Also, if I enable auto-save state in the mame.ini, does this cause problems for games that don't support it?

Thanks again!!!

Not sure if there's a list of games that support autosave or not, but I do know that having it turned on (autosave 1) won't affect games that don't support it.  So, there's no harm there. HOWEVER, core changes to MAME could render previous save states invalid. It happened to me and Donkey Kong. I used to just use the save states, but after a particular new build, it ran like crap autoloading the save. Only choice was to delete it.

[u_rebelscum]

Thanks - New questions:  Is there a list somewhere of what games support auto-save state and/or NVRAM?

Mame's -listxml output tells if savestate works for that game or not: look at the "stavestate" attribute in the game's "driver" element. 

Whether NVRAM saves high scoure is not noted though.

[Tiger-Heli]

Mame's -listxml output tells if savestate works for that game or not: look at the "stavestate" attribute in the game's "driver" element. 

Yet another dumb question - How would I do that?

I ran "Mame" -listxml >xmlfile and got a 26M xml file and opened that in Opera (browser) but it just looked like a list of all the games strung together. . . 

[Buddabing]

I show only 664 games supporting savestate thus far.

[u_rebelscum]

Mame's -listxml output tells if savestate works for that game or not: look at the "stavestate" attribute in the game's "driver" element. 

Yet another dumb question - How would I do that?

I ran "Mame" -listxml >xmlfile and got a 26M xml file and opened that in Opera (browser) but it just looked like a list of all the games strung together. . . 

I find it easier to just use notepad than IE or firefox if I just want to look at the info as a whole, as the xml is more a database than a formated paper that browsers treat them.  I don't have Opera, so can't tell you anything about that, but IE is dog slow.  I actually use textpad at home, but notepad at work, err... works too.

If I want something clearer or repeatable, xslt is a great flexible way to parse the data and build seperate lists.   I just downloaded Krick's xml2info xslt and edit it as needed.  (For example, his xml2list_xslt does a better job than xml2list.exe at translating mame's listxml to the old listinfo format.)  He has posted other xslt examples over at mame.net forum, too.  I don't really know the transfomation language, but it's so easy I've been able to piece together stuff by just looking at his examples.

[MiKman]

Did some more digging.  Hi-Score support was removed in 107u1, but they never announced it.

eek! what's going to happen to all our currently save highscores? I would hate to lose em all...

[krick]

Here's an XSL transform that outputs HTML so you can use your browser to do the transform.

Just put this file (after removing the .txt extension) in the same folder with your mame XML file.  Then edit your XML file and add this as the second line...

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="savestates.xsl"?>

...then save and open the XML file in your browser.

[JoyMonkey]

For the lazy among us (i.e. me), there's a 'Save State' category in Mame32 that lists 673 games with working savestate function. You can grab M32 108 here.

[Tiger-Heli]

For the lazy among us (i.e. me), there's a 'Save State' category in Mame32 that lists 673 games with working savestate function. You can grab M32 108 here.

Sweet - Thanks

[Buddabing]

The news isn't all bad on save states.

It turns out that many drivers were written with save states but were never turned on. It should be a matter of  turning on the save state flag in the code (the easy part) and testing all the games in question (the hard part)

I'm going to post something over at mame.net to see if anyone wants to help out testing.

The binary and new games list are in a zip file here

[Tiger-Heli]

I hope it goes over well at www.mame.net.

This is an unpopular change by Aaron, but a lot of the reasons do make sense - less of a hack, less problems troubleshooting, etc.

And in reality it is more accurate - the original games didn't save high scores, but they were also always turned on, so you didn't walk up to the game and see the video initialization screen (unless you wanted to guarantee you got the high score), so now this is what MAME emulates - walking up to a game already running for some period of time . . .

[Minwah]

This is an unpopular change by Aaron, but a lot of the reasons do make sense - less of a hack, less problems troubleshooting, etc.

I often don't like change but this one I welcome with open arms