Jason Carr

Thank you @Mute64. I've noted these issues and we'll look into them. The automation bindings for volume are active while the games are running on purpose, so yeah, binding those to the right stick probably won't work well. The best thing is probably to use a button combination for that. Unfortunately fixing startup screens to work with Rocket Launcher is a nightmare (if not impossible to fix), so we're just saying that they're not compatible together. Unfortunately bezel support is still one of those things too that just isn't possible without hackery and extensive scripts for everything, so we don't plan on tackling that. It's just much better handled by the emulators themselves.

There might not be a good way to do this, unfortunately, if you don't want to use the text lists. Currently the wheels require images.

Thank you @e2zippo. Very good to hear. I'll call out @C-Beats so he can read it as well.

Thanks @Shad8. Unfortunately though things are just not going to work correctly for turfmast, because of the negative scores. Currently it thinks a score of 3 is a better score than -7. So for that game, things are just not going to work. I can look into seeing what we can do to fix it, but that one is certainly an interesting outlier.

Yeah, the problem appears to be either with MAME or with hi2txt. When I play Dig Dug and get a high score, a digdug.hi file does appear in my MAME\hi folder. So if that's not happening, then it could be that your MAME is not configured correctly or not working properly. Do you have that file? I believe this suggests that there's an issue with hi2txt for Rainbow Islands. I'll follow up with Greatstone about it.

Most likely you just don't have things enabled properly. See the first post of this topic. Also make sure you're running version 10.13 of LaunchBox. The best thing is to attach the log file for those games (see the first post of this topic). That way I can look to see where the issue lies (either with hi2txt or with LaunchBox) and we can get it fixed.

Ah, I see, makes sense. That's gonna really throw off the entire scoring algorithm for that game though, since -2 is less than -1. So scoring just is not going to work properly for that game, at least for now. When I built it I didn't envision any games using negative scores. Honestly I have no idea what the "unibios" is, but keep in mind that some versions of games support high scores, while others do not.

There's no official support for MAMEUI64, so I would still recommend using an official version of MAME. If you're still having issues after that, read the first post to confirm everything and then post your log file.

They should be specific to MAMEUI64.

Do you have the log files for those games? I'll look into them, but the log files would help. There could be an issue with hi2txt for Alpine Ski. Armor Attack most likely needs some default scores added so that it can ignore them. The only thing I can figure is that maybe the score that was submitted was a default score, and not a score that was actually achieved. I have been going through and cleaning out some default scores, so that's probably what happened. That game may also be broken though, because the only score I see is a -1 lol. I'll look into it. Please read the first post of this thread in detail, and do what it asks.

From the article I linked: But it's really hard to get good information on this stuff, I'm finding, so I don't have any exact dates. I've also had a really hard time finding accurate information because of Google's announcing it and then backing off due to community outcry (no surprise). I believe the restrictions were originally planned for Android 10, but they backed them off because the community thew a fit, as they should. But now they're trying again for Android 11, and from what I can tell, it seems to be sticking this time. Part of the problem is all of the confusion surrounding the matter.

Cool. Both plugin.ini and mame.ini should be in the root MAME emulator directory, and no other directories should contain either mame.ini or plugin.ini. The hiscore line should be set to 1 in plugin.ini.

If it's an official version of MAME, all I can figure is that you might have a stray configuration file somewhere. Can you search your MAME folder for copies of mame.ini and plugin.ini?

If it's empty, I'm guessing that high scores just aren't working properly in MAME for some reason. What version of MAME are you running?

I've done all my testing with the hiscore.dat files that come with MAME. I've tested a couple of different MAME versions though, including 0.219, which was the latest during development. But I'm not entirely sure if you can mismatch versions of MAME with different versions of that file. Yes, in order for high scores to be uploaded, the leaderboard inside of the game has to change, which will force MAME to update the high scores file for the game. We originally had enabled uploading previous high scores, but unfortunately that opens up all kinds of new methods to cheat, so we had to disable that. Unfortunately your best bet, if you want to get on the community leaderboards is just to delete the existing high scores file. That should reset your local scores (can always back it up if you need). The logs show that it can't find a high scores file for Galaga. Can you check your MAME\hi folder for a file named galaga.hi? If MAME doesn't create that file, then we can't use it to track your high scores, so that's the first step in figuring it out.

Hi Dave, I see the Robotron score being uploaded successfully, but I don't see any previous attempts in the log file. Did you maybe restart LaunchBox beforehand? They may be in a previous log file. After that I see Nibbler and then Galaga. Both are saying that no high scores files were found that were outputted from MAME. Usually this happens when no high scores are achieved. Did you achieve any high scores for those games and appear on the leaderboards?

The hiscore.dat file inside the hi2txt folder is not used. It's just there because it's included with hi2txt as an example. The hiscore.dat file comes with MAME and it's important that you use the version of it that comes with it.

@iSelfishGene I just noticed that you're using MAMEUI64. I'm not positive, but I'm also not sure if MAME high scores will work with MAMEUI64. You may need an official release of MAME itself in order for it to work.

Hi @iSelfishGene, apparently MAME isn't outputting a high scores file, per this line: Aborting MameHighScores.Parse: No high score or nvram files found. What version of MAME are you running? Did you achieve an actual high score on the 1942 leaderboard?

Thank you @7ank0v1c, that is really great to hear.

Hey all, I thought I'd start this topic for anyone who's having trouble getting their MAME high scores to upload. First off, if you haven't updated to version 10.13, please do, as that does fix a number of issues with some games. Please keep in mind that high scores work only with official MAME versions. They unfortunately do not work with Retroarch or when launching via Rocket Launcher, most notably because that they get in the way of our anti-cheat routines. Of course, you also have to be connected the LaunchBox Games Database (under the Cloud menu in LaunchBox) and you have to have these settings checked as well: It's important to read all of the text in that above dialog. Then, if you're still having problems, the first thing to do is enable Debug Logging here: You can get there in LaunchBox under Tools > Options > Debugging. Once you have it enabled, each run of LaunchBox will create a separate log file in your LaunchBox\Logs folder. These log files contain helpful information to determine what's happening with the high scores (and other things). You can open them up with a text file, and look for a section like this: 2020-04-14 09:55:54 AM Processing hi2txt output for smashtv: # TOP SCORES RANK|SCORE|NAME 1|3051048|JON 2|1848000|TIM 3|1798218|TJE 4|1750072|LIP 5|1691196|MLZ 6|1651008|GWS 7|1606233|ALT 8|570218|BLS 9|500001|JON 10|456571|HEY 2020-04-14 09:55:54 AM MameHighScores.Parse: Uploading score 3051048 for rom file smashtv and name JON... You can easily find it by searching for "MameHighScores" in the file, and it should ultimately tell you the process of what happened. Otherwise, you can post the log file here and we can help you get it figured out. Feel free to post below with any issues you are having, but be aware that we are unable to help with much of anything until you post the log file for us. Update (2020-04-16): 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 create an issue ticket here on Github: https://github.com/GreatStoneEx/hi2txt-xml/issues Be sure to include your MAME version and all of the info you can provide, including uploading the nvram and .hi files (if they exist) for the game. Greatstone can then take a look at it to see if the game can be fixed.

Gotcha, thanks @neil9000. Good to know. I'll probably stick with MAME for now.

Out of curiosity, what's the reason to use Arcade64? Asking for my own personal collection.

That is actually just a video file, and those boxes are intended to be there that way. That's how James Baker made the video.

Oddly I don't see any white boxes in the image. Did you post the wrong image?