Jason Carr

Not currently. We may add something like that in the future, but unfortunately we have more priority things to tackle for the high scores currently.

Yeah, there's nothing we can do about that. Those games are and always were pay-to-win. So we're not going to be able to ever solve that problem. The good news though is that those games are relatively rare.

I see, good to know. I don't think that's a deal breaker though.

I don't think we need to worry about default.cfg, just the game-specific cfg files. Maybe it would still be possible to cheat using default.cfg though? Not sure.

In that case, we can just refuse to upload the high scores.

I've only tested a couple of games, but it looks like every time a dip switch is adjusted for a game in MAME, the line in the .cfg file looks like this: <port tag=":DSWA" type="DIPSWITCH" mask="48" defvalue="48" value="16" /> <port tag=":DSWA" type="DIPSWITCH" mask="192" defvalue="64" value="0" /> So in theory, all I have to do is parse the .cfg file and remove any port tags that contain type="DIPSWITCH". So that may be a good solution. The only question I have is whether that will affect anyone's controls or other important configurations. Also, does anyone use dip switches for changing anything other than cheating-related things?

If it's changing them, it should be changing them to whatever folder you're choosing for importing the ROMs from. I've never heard that it's resetting them back to the defaults on imports, but I'll do some testing and we'll get it fixed if I can replicate.

Thanks, I'll go ahead and remove it.

I'm in agreement with pretty much everybody here. It's worth noting that it is straight up impossible to prevent 100% of the cheating due to the nature of emulation. Anybody could alter the emulator, alter the ROM, or any number of things, so it's never gonna be 100% cheat-proof. That said, I agree that we should do whatever we can to prevent casual cheating, so that at least it's difficult. But again, we're limited as to what MAME allows us to do. Per the .cfg files, at this point I don't think we can just delete them on startup. However, I will examine the contents of the files to see if there's any way I can modify them to remove only certain customizations, to see if that helps things.

Oic, I get it now. Yeah, LaunchBox.xml was retired years ago, so anything that refers to it now is moot. I haven't read this whole thread, so I don't know exactly what you're referring to. But you can change the folders for platforms under Tools > Manage Platforms. If you're requesting to be able to change all of them at once, you might have better luck using a text editor with search and replace on the platform XMLs. Just be careful with and make sure you create backups first.

Thanks, I appreciate that, but not everyone in your situation would be as gracious. Are you sure there's no way to set up default buttons globally, so that it behaves better without configuring every game?

@GAMe We haven't used a LaunchBox.xml file for years now. What version are you using?

I see, that's what I was worried about. Does it really require separate configurations for each and every game?

Okay, I will look into enforcing the cfg thing. I'm sure that we're going anger people no matter what we do at this point (just look at the whole Retroarch thing), but hopefully the cfg thing won't be a major issue for people.

I understand, but we don't need that sort of negativity here. You already expressed this in a different thread. Please stop being negative.

Quick question for everyone here, does anyone use the MAME game .cfg files for anything important or legitimate, other than changing jumper settings? Or does anyone use those files for important things like setting up controls? That's my biggest concern with deleting them in order to prevent cheating.

That's a great idea there.

That's not a bad idea. I wasn't aware of that being a possibility. I'll do some research on it and add that to my list.

Also, I *think* I just resolved the issue where scores with funky characters were not submitting properly.

I just looked at the database and removed 5 scores like that. I also added code to prevent those specific values from being added again. I'm still not sure why or how those scores are getting parsed, but at least it's solved going forward for those specific scenarios.

I just removed five of the highest scores out there, because they were obviously bugged. I don't see anything else in the database that I would call an "impossible" high score, after removing those five records. I also added code to prevent those bugged high scores from showing up again.

I did see that post, but I haven't heard back afaik. If necessary, I can add some code to prevent Retroarch from being used.

Thanks all. There are two known issues that I am aware of from the LaunchBox side of things regarding the high scores, that are affecting a handful of games: Games where negative scores are actually "higher" scores (golf for instance) are not tracked properly, because the system currently always identifies higher scores as higher scores Games that use multiple high scores tables are problematic, because we currently only have one high scores leaderboard per game. Gorf is an example of this. I'll be looking into both of these issues to try and get them resolved here soon. The multiple tables thing is a doozy though because it has the potential to over-complicate everything. Going to try and come up with a solution though.

Yup, at this point I agree that we should have never started it. But hindsight is 20/20. We started it because it was voted on by the community, and we always strive to do what the community wants. Unfortunately it ended up biting us, but it is what it is. Like I said, we may come back to it if Android gets past these growing pains.

If it was removed, it was probably because it was a default high score that comes with the game.