Jason Carr

Yes, agreed. This was a last ditch effort to prevent obvious cheating, and it succeeds in preventing a lot of it. But again, we'll never be able to catch everything. Regardless, it succeeds in my original goals: To encourage playing more MAME games by encouraging healthy competition To improve discovery of games you haven't played before To bring the community more together

Done.

At this point, I would encourage users not to touch dip switch changes at all. We will still ban for suspect scores. As much as I wish this was a perfect system, at some point I have to move on to other things, and I'm confident that what we have is as close as we're going to be able to get to getting rid of cheating. MAME was never built to prevent that to begin with.

So that is unfortunate. There are probably some games that are impossible to detect dip switch changes on for that reason. I don't want to give up on this whole feature though, because that would just be sad. We knew from the beginning that we'd never be able to completely eliminate hacking and cheating due to emulation. The good news is that cheating should be very difficult for the majority of games with this version, but apparently not all of them.

Apparently Moon Patrol operates differently than most other arcade games with the dip switches. With most games, at least the ones that I tested, the dip switch settings are not updated/refreshed while a game is active. Unfortunately with Moon Patrol, dip switches are updated and immediately take affect while the current game is running. On top of that, MAME doesn't update the .cfg file while the game is running, so unfortunately, we have zero visibility to that. Sadly this means that tracking dip switch changes (for Moon Patrol specifically) is impossible.

We go out of our way to prevent that. I'll review though to make sure that's not bugged. Please still send me your files so I can review.

@andyco47 If you would, please PM me your Moon Patrol .cfg file and your debug logs. I'll see if I can't take a look to see if there's something to fix. Currently, I'm pretty doubtful though.

I just tested Moon Patrol with dip switch changes and my score didn't upload. So I don't currently trust that there's an issue.

Are you using official MAME?

Exactly what did you do.

You just cheated? Are you kidding?

The update had been out for an hour by the time that score was achieved. I just checked. Please don't spread crap like this. It just creates unnecessary drama, and we don't need it. If you have proof of cheating, let me know. But I don't want to hear speculation that there's cheating just because of a high score posted. That's ridiculous.

That's not even remotely outside of the realm of possibility. Look at the highest Galaga high scores on Twin Galaxies... https://www.twingalaxies.com/game/galaga/arcade

The official version 10.14 is out now guys, and 10.12 and 10.13 can no longer upload high scores. All previous scores have also been reset.

Only newly achieved high scores are uploaded (scores achieved during the current run), so that should not be a relevant issue.

The 10.14 release is out. 10.12 and 10.13 can no longer upload high scores, and all high scores have been cleared. We should be good to go.

Alright version 10.14 is out now. 10.12 and 10.13 can no longer upload high scores, and all scores have been reset. We should be good to go; time to grab some new scores guys. Oh, btw, for anyone who hasn't seen this thread, nearly everyone voted to reset the high scores, so sorry if anyone is upset, but don't blame me.

We don't actually change any .cfg files at all, so I don't understand why they would be getting messed up. All we do is read the cfg files to make sure that the dip switches haven't been tampered with. If they have, we simply refuse to upload the high scores. Other than that, 10.14 is basically the same as previous versions, so any configuration changes shouldn't be being caused by LaunchBox. Looks like there's another issue with that game and hi2txt. If you can report it, I'd appreciate it. Details are in the first post of this topic.

Per #1, please read the updates in the first post of this topic. It sounds like those two games have some issues with hi2txt, and we should report them to GreatStone. #2 isn't something we can really do anything about. Those games are and always were pay-to-win by design. So for those games, it's just all about it being a marathon. The developers of the games ruined scores on those games by making them pay-to-win.

FYI all, all is looking good with the release, and clearly the vast majority vote is to reset the high scores. I will be putting out the 10.14 release here shortly this morning, then disabling submitting high scores for previous versions and resetting all the high scores.

FYI all, all is looking good with the release, and clearly the vast majority vote is to reset the high scores. I will be putting out the 10.14 release here shortly this morning, then disabling submitting high scores for previous versions and resetting all the high scores.

That's interesting. I'm guessing that you just must have it configured exactly like official MAME. There's nothing wrong with Arcade64 of course, so if it works, then great. It must be meeting all the anti-cheat requirements.

Supported games are read from the LaunchBox\ThirdParty\hi2txt\hi2txt.zip file. If you update the version of hi2txt in this folder with a new version, then the new games that are supported in that version will be marked as supported in LaunchBox. Unfortunately there's no way to determine whether those non-arcade MAME games are arcade or not, unless we hardcode a platform name, and require that all MAME high scores games use a specific platform name (like Arcade or MAME). I thought about doing that, but then I'm afraid people with custom platform names will have issues. So for this release, at least, we'll leave that the way it is. I don't know how else to deal with that issue.

If you've changed dipswitch settings previously, then deleting all cfg files will revert them all. Make sure you don't have any other important changes to your cfg files though. Unfortunately if that is done via a dip switch setting, then it will affect the high scores.

Awesome, thanks.