high scores Auto Save high scores

[TheNerdyJoker]

Hi,

I am looking for a way to auto save high scores and for them to auto loads when I play the game. I'm not sure of anything to do as I can have save states but I feel like there must be something someone has made that can do this as I want to have my whole retro machine never needing a keyboard to do anything once I am happy on where it is at. I don't want something that will save all the time where if i was playing double dragon I wouldn't want it to save the game play just the high scores saved as if I need to save the games like on zelda link to the past I would be able to save the game and the rom does that for me. I guess i want the same thing just to save the high scores so me and others can see who's doing the best etc.

Any help would be great thank you 

[Lordmonkus]

As far as I know you can only have hi scores or save states, not both.

You have to enable hi scores in plugin.ini, set hiscore to 1.

If you are loading save states on load as a method to bypass the sometimes long boot time of a game you are resetting the game to that point in time before the hi score was obtained.

The only potential ways around this that I can think of (there may be others I am unaware of) is to either not load a save state when you load a game or to generate a new save state after obtaining a new hi score before you close the game. Personally I would get rid of the loading of a save state when you start a game and just bind a fast forward button in Mame which is by default the Insert key.

Maybe someone has a better method for solving this problem.

[Lordmonkus]

Scratch everything I said in my previous post, it was wrong. That should learn me not to post when I just wake up and my brain isn't working fully and I have not fully tested everything I thought was true.

You can in fact have Mame auto load a save state and retain the hi score because the hi score is not tied to the save state at all.

The first thing you need to do is to tell Mame to enable hi scores, this is done in the plugin.ini, set hiscore to 1, for whatever reason the Mame devs decided that it should be off by default.

Now you will need to set a save state where you want the game to load at, presumably after all the boot junk at the title screen. How this is done will change a little bit depending on which version of Mame you are using. On a 186 install of Mame you press Shift + F7 first and then a number 0-9 to pick which save state position you wanted to save it at. With my 192 build I had to press Shift + F7 and then again a 2nd time which brings up a menu asking you what spot you wanted to save it at, I chose slot 0 in this case so I pressed 0 when it asked.

Now that the save state is set we want it to auto load when the game starts in Launchbox. All we need to do is add the command line parameter:

-state 0

Of course change out the 0 for whatever slot you used above when making the default save state.

You can now auto load past the initial boot sequence of the game with hi scores in tact. Of course though you will have to create save states for each game individually which is time consuming but such is life. I still recommend setting up a fast forward button on your controller which you can do in Mames UI, Insert is the default keyboard key.

[Aafneto]

hi... @Lordmonkus do you know if have any way to do the high scores works in retroarch mame core?!

[Curryking32000]

Following on from this, I have got my Mame games to save highscores, is there anyway to save high scores on other platforms, such as Genesis, nes, snes, GBA, GBC,  mastersystem etc?

[jkimrey]

Does the current MAME implementation of hiscore (plugin) work on all games?  I have it set to 1 in the plugins.ini but it's still not saving high scores in Ms Pacman....