Jason Carr

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?

Oooooh, you're seeing a different issue that we have seen elsewhere. This has nothing to do with that Big Box setting you pointed out earlier. Go to Tools > Options > Legacy > Images > Background Priorities and uncheck everything there. We're gonna have a fix for that out shortly, but that should do it. Edit: That's in LaunchBox.

There's much more to it, unfortunately. At this point it looks like it's just not compatible with mameuifx. I'd have to rebuild a bunch of stuff I'm guessing. It touches a lot of files in the MAME directory to make sure that cheating isn't happening.

Can you give me a screenshot example of this? Yeah, primarily because we need more control over the emulator. We need to control both the way that MAME launches, as well as have direct access to the files. I'm sure it could be done, but not without being able to both parse and change Rocket Launcher data. On top of that, we need visibility to when MAME starts and exits, which also may prove difficult. It's just layers on top of layers of complications.

Really sorry, but unfortunately support for Rocket Launcher won't be happening for MAME high scores. It would be way too involved to implement, and there's just not very many people using it these days, so it's not worth the significant effort.

I'm confused here. That filters setting should only affect the filters/platforms views, not the games views at all.

Aaaaah, yeah, unfortunately Rocket Launcher will definitely get in the way of the process. We do a number of things in order to do our best to make sure that folks aren't cheating. Unfortunately that rules out support for Rocket Launcher and Retroarch.

Hi Danny, yes, it's certainly grim news. It is possible that all these issues with Android will come and go without affecting much in the end, but there's enough in question that we don't want to invest any more time without knowing for sure, and things aren't looking good, sadly. Per emulation on the go, I do wish there were better options. The best I can recommend is mobile devices that run full versions of Windows. I have both a GPD Win and a GPD Win 2. The GPD Win 2 is especially good for emulation, but the problem is that mine didn't last very long. Unfortunately the build quality is not very good for those devices at all. I'm looking forward to DELL's Concept UFO coming out; I think that will ultimately be a wonderful solution once it finally comes out.

I'm puzzled then, not sure why that would be. It only outputs that to the logs if it thinks that file doesn't exist at all. That's odd. I'm not seeing that issue myself. Can anyone else confirm this to be an issue?

Sorry to hear. Sounds like another strange issue. Have you tried rebooting your Shield?

LaunchBox looks for the hiscore.dat file in the plugins\hiscore folder. Are you sure it doesn't work if you create those folders and copy hiscore.dat there? The log file you posted is still claiming that it can't find that file.

Good to hear @Hamfighter. Thanks for all the kind words.

Yeah, there's a lot I wish that we could do to simplify things from an emulator perspective. For example, I wish we could just distribute Retroarch and MAME all pre-configured and ready to go with LaunchBox. Unfortunately though, that's not really possible due to the licensing concerns and such. OpenEmu is in a bit different of a situation because of the fact that the project is open source.

Thanks Neil. There's actually a legit error report there for that game. I'll take a look to see what's happening for it here soon.

Hmm, not sure. I haven't tested anything with mameuifx. I'm not sure if it's related to that, or is just that the paths settings were changed away from the defaults. It's worth a shot to copy the file.

Would be helpful to see the debug log for that. That way we can determine what's causing the problem.

It's possible that there may be a broken game or two. If it didn't upload, it probably won't. That said, you can turn on debug logging to figure out exactly what is happening.

Thank you very much @Hamfighter! All great to hear.

Thanks for the suggestion, @Hamfighter. I do like OpenEmu and have been impressed with the product over the years. That said, I don't think it would wise for us to acquire any other companies or products.