Question about high score patch

[ivwshane]

Does the high score patch have any affect on games that unlock extras the more you play it? For example, street fighter alpha 3 has hidden characters which can be unlocked after playing it for a certain amount of time. Do I need the high score patch to maintain the number of plays or does mame support that natively?

In either situation is there a way to cheat and have sfa3 think I've played it more than I have (like via a file edit)?

[Fyrecrypts]

Good question, some games stored this data on nvram, and in that case all versions of MAME will save the data to disk in the nvram folder. Some of the .hi files generated from the hiscore.dat actually do store this type of data. A good example is bubble bobble, the game decides which bonus items to give based on how many of other bonus items have been given. Without the patch, these values are always reset on exiting MAME, making for pretty predictable items. With the patch, it's much more similar to an arcade machine that's been on for hours, and been through multiple plays.

I haven't looked at street fighter alpha 3 in the hiscore.dat yet, but if it doesn't include those bytes, someone dedicated enough may go through and look for these values in memory and add it. Once/If the values are in the hiscore.dat it's a simple matter of opening up the sfa3.hi file and modifying those bytes in a hex editor. It's also possible this data is stored in nvram, and if so, nothing would need to be done in the hiscore.dat, and you would modify the sfa3.nv file. This can be tricky, and it's not always simple as changing a 00 to 30. Some games have internal data protection with checksums, or requiring the data to be in multiple places (see Robotron scores in nvram for example).

[ivwshane]

Thanks for the info!


I looked into maws but I didn't see anything that specified how the secrets were achieved.