Troubleshooting MAME High Scores

[Retro808]

55 minutes ago, flytechguy said:

Yyyyyeah, this Three Stooges / user score is HIGHLY suspect.

 

[flytechguy]

7 minutes ago, Retro808 said:

 

LOL! At least he admitted it! 

[xevious1974]

Is there a way to move, in launchbox, the highscore window after images or video? Or remove it?

I like the new feature but I cannot see the video when I click on a game, I have to scroll down. Yes, I can use big box, but I like to use launchbox also.

ty

 

[neil9000]

1 minute ago, xevious1974 said:

Is there a way to move, in launchbox, the highscore window after images or video? Or remove it?

I like the new feature but I cannot see the video when I click on a game, I have to scroll down. Yes, I can use big box, but I like to use launchbox also.

ty

 

You would need to copy the theme, rename it, then edit the xaml.

[xevious1974]

11 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

You would need to copy the theme, rename it, then edit the xaml.

thank you,

too hard for me.

 

thank you anyway

 

[Rincewind]

@xevious1974 you could try one of these themes, I added them to the bottom already.

https://forums.launchbox-app.com/files/file/1697-rincewind/

[Jason Carr]

16 hours ago, flytechguy said:

Yyyyyeah, this Three Stooges / user score is HIGHLY suspect.

Just removed that score. Repeated numeric patterns like that are a tell-tale sign of a glitch.

[flytechguy]

3 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Just removed that score. Repeated numeric patterns like that are a tell-tale sign of a glitch.

I figured with the repeating numbers.  Not being a tattle tale, just noticing stuff like that here and there.  Some folks are legit good at games (that Wolfanoz guy in particular!)

[andyco47]

wot happens if you use a different rom set for a rom.

Edited April 26, 2020 by andyco47

[GreatStone]

@Jason Carr @flytechguy

@Underoath13  

About the games reporting "1515151515151515" as a top score, can anyone give me a logfile from LaunchBox showing that it is what is displayed by hi2txt itself?

LaunchBox is logging hi2txt output and I would like to see one of them with this score... to be sure it is coming form here.

Currently, my best guess is: program finds a nvam/hi file, existing but locked or empty, so that a read() will return "-1", converted into 0xFFFFFFFF, converted again into decimal as "1515151515151515", letters by letters. So, a read file error.

I love such mystery

 

[LaunchRoo]

Hi, just wondering if Mad Planets could be added to Launchbox high scores again...it's supported by hi2txt and was supported by Launchbox in 10.13...not sure why it's disappeared from the list since. Cheers.

[Jason Carr]

6 hours ago, GreatStone said:

@Jason Carr @flytechguy

@Underoath13  

About the games reporting "1515151515151515" as a top score, can anyone give me a logfile from LaunchBox showing that it is what is displayed by hi2txt itself?

LaunchBox is logging hi2txt output and I would like to see one of them with this score... to be sure it is coming form here.

Currently, my best guess is: program finds a nvam/hi file, existing but locked or empty, so that a read() will return "-1", converted into 0xFFFFFFFF, converted again into decimal as "1515151515151515", letters by letters. So, a read file error.

I love such mystery

 

I've seen it several times, including one time myself, but unfortunately that was before we added the extensive logging. I'll keep my eye out for it. If anyone has a log file, please speak up.

Looking at the LaunchBox code, it won't read anything from hi2txt unless "Score" is found as a header, so I don't think it's possible for LaunchBox to be running into a read file error like that. That said, I haven't seen a log file either, so that's hard to prove or be 100% certain about without. I'll see if I can't do some more testing to replicate. Thanks @GreatStone.

[Jason Carr]

5 hours ago, LaunchRoo said:

Hi, just wondering if Mad Planets could be added to Launchbox high scores again...it's supported by hi2txt and was supported by Launchbox in 10.13...not sure why it's disappeared from the list since. Cheers.

I disabled a small handful of games that were causing problems due to various things, such as the games having multiple high scores tables that can't be lumped together, or using custom high scores values (like times, for example). These were unfortunately disabled because the community high scores leaderboards just won't work well for those games. They may have appeared to work previously, but would have eventually been cause for issues, as the scores were not being properly tracked.

[silveralex]

On 4/24/2020 at 3:42 PM, silveralex said:

Ran the game again just now. Attached log file.

It's a ying no new scores found to upload though it shows my score as #6 on the list

RANK|SCORE|NAME|STAGE
1|50000|HKR|1
2|40000|UCH|1
3|30000|SAT|1
4|20000|HAG|1
5|10000|HAS|1
6|6400|ALX|1
7|5000|TOS|1
2020-04-24 03:39:06 PM MameHighScores.Parse: No new scores found to upload!

 

Debug 2020-04-24 03-34-45 PM.log 18.72 kB · 0 downloads

I noticed altbeast had both a nvram and a file in the hi folder. Is that supposed to happen?

I deleted both and was then able to post a high score. Still not sure what went wrong to cause the problem.

[GreatStone]

Ok, so I finally found the source of the "151515..." scores.

For games relying on nvram, depending on when you go out of mame, the content of the file can be full of 0xFF (nvram not yet written by the board?), or partially plagued with such 0xFF (nvram under writing?): centiped has given me a lot of different nvram contents, even without achieving a hiscore.

I am implementing a generic code (whatever is the game) to detect this situation as much as possible. I am still thinking about what to do after: replace such score by "0" instead? do not display anything at all if one score is like that? the 2nd solution could be also a way to deal with the more problematic case of NAMEs as 0xFF can be a possible encoding sometimes for a letter.

Perhaps safer to skip the whole file even if one of your valid hiscores will be missed: at least the central DB will be cleaner. What do you think? @Jason Carr

[MustardCowboy]

On 4/25/2020 at 5:49 PM, GreatStone said:

@MustardCowboy Zaxxon scores are fixed with the attached xml file to put inside the hi2txt.zip file burried into LaunchBox.

zaxxon.xml 2.35 kB · 3 downloads

Thank you! Also, I didn't mention this in my other post but being able to upload scores is a fantastic option and I appreciate all the work from everyone that went into this, as well as all the current work being done to keep the scores accurate. I have no doubt that I won't be able to keep my name on any of the all-time lists, but just having goals to shoot for has added new life to all of my game-playing!

 

 

[ItchyRobot]

It's been a few days since I was keeping up with this thread...

I see there are many posts about deleting my *.hi files out of the "hi" MAME folder. And also some posts saying to delete files out of the NVRAM folder. Should I do both?

I know some games require some finagling to them working correctly, such as Track and Field. So I am a bit hesitant to start deleting NVRAM files. Are there any games that I should avoid deleting the NVRAM? It's been so long since I got all the MAME roms working correctly, I am unsure if deleting the NVRAM will cause issues or require me to do some research to get the games running as intended again. For some reason I am remembering Track and Field giving me issues back in the day and I had to some stuff to get it to log hi scores locally. I assume there may be other roms that I messed with to get running too, but can not remember.

[Blitz Mary]

Bug in Flying Shark (World Version) I did 107.000 high score and actually  is displaying 800,101,020

[Jason Carr]

5 hours ago, GreatStone said:

Ok, so I finally found the source of the "151515..." scores.

For games relying on nvram, depending on when you go out of mame, the content of the file can be full of 0xFF (nvram not yet written by the board?), or partially plagued with such 0xFF (nvram under writing?): centiped has given me a lot of different nvram contents, even without achieving a hiscore.

I am implementing a generic code (whatever is the game) to detect this situation as much as possible. I am still thinking about what to do after: replace such score by "0" instead? do not display anything at all if one score is like that? the 2nd solution could be also a way to deal with the more problematic case of NAMEs as 0xFF can be a possible encoding sometimes for a letter.

Perhaps safer to skip the whole file even if one of your valid hiscores will be missed: at least the central DB will be cleaner. What do you think? @Jason Carr

Awesome, that is great to hear @GreatStone. Thank you for diving into that one; I think that's the biggest issue we're currently having. I'm not positive, but it seems to be happening only when no scores are achieved (at least that's when I've seen it). I would prefer if nothing was output in that scenario, because there is no valid data. So either an error or just an empty output would work best for us.

[Jason Carr]

1 hour ago, ItchyRobot said:

It's been a few days since I was keeping up with this thread...

I see there are many posts about deleting my *.hi files out of the "hi" MAME folder. And also some posts saying to delete files out of the NVRAM folder. Should I do both?

I know some games require some finagling to them working correctly, such as Track and Field. So I am a bit hesitant to start deleting NVRAM files. Are there any games that I should avoid deleting the NVRAM? It's been so long since I got all the MAME roms working correctly, I am unsure if deleting the NVRAM will cause issues or require me to do some research to get the games running as intended again. For some reason I am remembering Track and Field giving me issues back in the day and I had to some stuff to get it to log hi scores locally. I assume there may be other roms that I messed with to get running too, but can not remember.

I would recommend not deleting anything, and reporting any issues you run into here. If you're having to delete those files in order to get things working correctly, then we have a game-specific bug to fix.