MAME upgrade loses save states/high scores on upgrade?

[Shoegazer]

I recently noticed when I upgraded to MAME .109 that the save states containing high scores are no longer valid.  You get the "Failed to load state" message at the bottom of the screen, even though a save state exists.  This is particularly bad for games with no NVRAM (pacman, mspacman, galaga, centipede etc.) because the high scores are completely blown away with the states after each upgrade; while games with NVRAM (defender, joust, bubbles etc.) still contain high scores after an upgrade due to the divergent method of saving the game data.

Anyone here know if there's something I'm doing wrong, or is this really an annoyance to be tolerated until a "fix" is issued (assuming this is possible)?  I completely supported the MAMEdev's recent decision to move away from hiscore.dat since it is a total hack and interfered with game drivers, but having all your high scores wiped out with every upgrade defeats the purpose of using save states to begin with.  Right?

Thanks,
Darren

http://nonmame.retrogames.com

http://nonmess.retrogames.com

[krick]

Save states are not guaranteed to be compatible between different versions of MAME.

Aaron has said (in his blog, I believe) that it might be possible to make them compatible across versions but I don't know what ever became of that idea and how much would have to change to implement it.

If I can find his comment, I'll post a link.

[tommyinajar]

You most likely know this by now but I was searching for the same answer.
"-autosave" will work on a lot of games. They phased out the hiscore.dat stuff, something to do with compatibility ....

[FrizzleFried]

I have resigned to the fact that my cabinet is going to run version .108 until such a time that it is REQUIRED I upgrade to get a game working...because of this very reason.   I don't want to lose my hiscores. 

[Havok]

I have resigned to the fact that my cabinet is going to run version .108 until such a time that it is REQUIRED I upgrade to get a game working...because of this very reason.   I don't want to lose my hiscores. 

See my other post - it's easy to compile Mame and add the hiscore support back in...