Jason Carr

@Underoath13 @Xpendable Thank you guys. I guess we'll need to let Greatstone know that there's something weird going on with Centipede. I was thrown back because I've broken records with Centipede many times and for some reason I've never run into any issues. I just take issues with broad assumptions that things are globally broken. Anyways, if you guys could report it to Greatstone, that'd be great. I posted new steps at the bottom of the first post in this topic for reporting broken games to Greatstone. Since it's working for me, it might require a specific version of MAME or something of that nature in order to reproduce the issue. Also, one thing I did learn from Greatstone is that if you replace the hiscores.dat file, things can break if you don't remove your existing .hi and nvram files.

Do please let us know what other games you're running into this on. As far as I'm aware, this only fixes digdug, but that's also fixed with the updated zip file above. If any other games are having the same issue, Greatstone can look at it and hopefully get it fixed.

I owe all of that to Greatstone. He's really been bending over backwards to help us out and fix anything that is found. So for anyone interested in sending any support or thanks his direction, here's the hi2txt site: http://greatstone.free.fr/hi2txt/

I would discourage you from changing anything away from the defaults, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately MAME doesn't make it possible for us to track or prevent changing board configurations (at least as far as I am aware). So some things have to just be left up to trust, and it's always going to be a fairly casual leaderboard system, because MAME emulation is far from perfect. Regardless, I would encourage everyone to be honest and not tweak any board settings to make things easier.

If you enable saving high scores, it disables save states, because of course that enables all kinds of cheating. You should be able to use save states again if you disable uploading high scores.

Ah, interesting. That is good to know. I'll look into that. I didn't even realize weird characters like that were possible to input.

It will only upload your newly-achieved high scores. That's part of our anti-cheat system. No, it's not a broken system. It also has nothing to do with your license because the high scores do not require a license for LaunchBox Premium. If you have any further issues, please read the first post of this topic.

Please see the first post of this topic.

FYI, Greatstone was able to figure out the issue with Dig Dug, so I'll be putting out a new beta shortly with the an updated version of hi2txt to fix that particular issue. Edit: If you want to fix it sooner, replace your LaunchBox\ThirdParty\hi2txt\hi2txt.zip file with the one I've attached here. @Underoath13 hi2txt.zip

Hi @7ank0v1c, if LaunchBox is creating the Games folder, then most likely one or more of your platforms is defaulting to that folder for games. Check your platforms under Tools > Manage Platforms in LaunchBox, and update any necessary paths, and you should be good to go.

All I'm asking for is a log file. I understand it's hard to achieve a high score, and that you're upset because it didn't register. We have hundreds of people using the system without issues, including with Centipede. Your invalid assumption was that it's broken for everyone, and perhaps for all or even most games, which you misjudged. Doesn't matter whether you're a developer or not. Even developers make mistakes. I certainly know that one well. But anyways, thanks for the report. For everyone else's sake, please don't use the same incorrect logic here.

FYI all, we are working with Greatstone (the developer of hi2txt) to hopefully get any games that are bugged fixed. It's important to note that it's a tremendously difficult task to save high scores for every arcade game, because every arcade game is programmed completely differently, so that is no easy feat. On top of that, there may also be bugs for some games in MAME's high scores plugin (or the related hiscores.dat file). The majority of popular games seem to be working great though, so we'll take these issues case-by-case. If you find an issue with a particular game, we should still look at the log file first and foremost, to determine if the issue happens to be an issue on your system, or if the issue happens to be with LaunchBox. Then if LaunchBox does not appear to be the issue (for example if hi2txt is just not reporting any updated scores), then we can report the issue to Greatstone so he can look into it. Greatstone has published these testing steps to help make sure that you have indeed actually found a bug with a particular game: http://greatstone.free.fr/hi2txt/doc/help.html If after testing you're confident that there is a bug with a particular game, you can post it to this document here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vdv8YH4Pn3ti6I6cttCTClnk8Tml2MnlCGlPISaTEbE/edit?usp=sharing Greatstone can then take a look at it to see if the game can be fixed. I'll update the first post of this topic with this info as well.

I see. I didn't expect/think about there being such a low horizontal resolution when I built that popup, unfortunately. Sadly there's not a way to change it currently with a theme, either. I'll see what I can do for the next release though.

Again, we need to see the log file. I understand that it's not working on your system, but first off, please do your best not to make invalid assumptions, and secondly, we can't help fix it until we understand what's going on on your system. I am currently seeing some bugs with the MAME high score system and Dig Dug, but Centipede does not appear to have any issues.

Yeah, both those games are showing those weird characters, so that could be the problem. Are you able to successfully achieve high scores with other games? I'm wondering if somehow there's a culture/translation issue.

What is your resolution and what are your DPI settings?

I just set a new score for Centipede without issues, so it sounds like there's some kind of an issue with your setup if you're experiencing that issue with Centipede. We should look into the log file. Reading deeper into what you've said above, I'm also not sure if you're understanding how things work. Just because the initials are already in the system does not mean that new scores will not upload.

This doesn't seem to be happening for every game, and wasn't coming up in our testing, so I'm not sure exactly why it's happening now. My guess is that it's only affecting certain games. We're looking into it.

Please see the first post of this topic.

We'll need details in order to help you with this. It doesn't sound like things are necessarily in the correct folders. The easiest way to get platform videos is to just go to Tools > Download Platform/Playlist Theme Videos in LaunchBox. Game videos are a separate thing though, and you can download those from EmuMovies during the import processes, or by going to Tools > Download Metadata and Media.

Thank you @xevious1974. If you find any games like that, please post the log file and we can review. Greatstone is also going to provide troubleshooting and game-specific error reporting here shortly for games that have issues.

Hi Claudio, this puzzles me. Have you confirmed that you're actually able to upload high scores that way? Because looking at the code, I'm not sure how that could ever work.

Strange, I am able to replicate that weirdness with Dig Dug. MAME for some crazy reason just doesn't seem to be updating the high scores file. I'll talk to Greatstone to see if he knows anything about that. Yes, as far as I am aware, this is how it's supposed to operate.

Have you downloaded videos for your collection?

Are you pressing a key during the startup video? If no key or button is pressed, it should play the whole video, but if you press a key or button, it will skip it.