The NEW Build Your Own Arcade Controls
Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: allroy1975 on November 12, 2003, 01:35:58 am
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I hate thinking this stuff up, because I have no idea how to do it or if it can be done.
Would it be possible to dump out all your high scores to something like an excel file? or even a txt that would say like:
Arkanoid - 103,304
Pac-Man - 154,340
Zaxxon - 5643
or something like that?
I thought i'd be kinda cool to just look over all my high scores and maybe compare them to other peoples to see how bad I really am at these games...might be kinda fun...even if it's really useless ;D
Allroy
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There is some way to do this if you can go through the Mame source code and reverse engineer the file format so you can parse it.
I've never understood why the Mame dev's use so many binary filetypes when ascii makes so much more sense for them.. Stuff like hiscore files and cfg files even....
Does anyone know how to parse those things?
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I don't think that would be too hard. It could work off of hiscore.dat and just save the values to a txt file. Of course, I haven't looked at any of the code that deals with hiscore.dat, so I could be very wrong.
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like I said...I hate this because I have NO idea how to do it...
so...anyone smart feel like being nice? ;)
Allroy
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so...anyone smart feel like being nice? ;)
I would, but I'm on a coding vacation. Send me an e-mail and I'll do it when I feel like returning to reality.
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It is possible, but has to be hand coded for each game pretty much. The way mame hi score's are saved are it just saves a chunk of memory to disk. To get mame to do it properly, you dont need to know how its stored, just where, so each file is different to the next. Some are easy to work out, being basically in plain ascii, others are a damn site harder, with it storing a list of names, then a list of scores, some store them in hex, some in decimal etc.
You then also have a problem with games that dont store their hi scores using the mame hi score feature, but instead store it in an nvram file. This is kinda the same problem, but its worse because nvram files store lots of stuff and can be big, whereas most of the hi-score files just grab the memory needed for the hi score table.
I started writing a Java app to help work out each file format, then convert it to some form of data file, and I was going to use it in my front-end I am working on. I worked out about 20 odd of my fav games, but havent touched it in a couple of weeks.
If there was a big enough want for this feature I could work on it a bit more formally than my usual "just coding what I need" attitude towards it....
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yeah, I ended up writing the guy who maintains the "unofficial" hiscore.dat - figuring he'd be familliar with how each is saved. As of yet, I haven't heard anything back from him. Last time I wrote him he wrote right back, so I'm guessing he's not interested. :) or else he coding it for me. lol
Allroy