Troubleshooting MAME High Scores

[xevious1974]

12 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

If you would, please test 10.14-beta-2 to make sure everything is still working properly for you. It should be, but would be good to know if you run into any issues.

I have installed and here what I have found:

Mouse was still working and configurated

Joystick buttons was no more configurated, but I have found that start and coin (9 and 8 buttons were still working, mame default are 5 and 1 keys, so I dont understand)

Anyway I have loadad Killer Instinct and I have changed my button config, played then quitted. Reloaded and mame has saved my new buttons configurations

I have loaded Wardner and I had similar result.

Maybe:

global configuration has been kept

while specific game configuration has been deleted but it can be redone and it works

 

I hope it can help

[Devilquest]

I found an issue on the game Ghouls'n Ghosts (ghouls). Just played a bit. I did not pass the first level, the boss killed me (yeah I’m that bad). But some way I got the world best score: 40,008,000.
I took 2 screenshots one from LaunchBox, other from the game score.
Now I’ve deleted the “.hi” file (ghouls.hi) and everything  works as intended. But maybe is a thing that devs may look. Or maybe add a feature to remove/reset your own high scores form the LaunchBox database.

Hope it helps.

[Jason Carr]

4 hours ago, xevious1974 said:

@Jason Carr

I have found others 2 different situation with high score.

1) I enter an highscore and then it is saved in a different way: G-Darius Ver.2 - New Zero Team and Alpine Ski (I do 1000 points but it is saved in leaderboard like 700k)

2) In some games you can continue inserting coins and the score is not resetted. In the Hunt (I have finished it) and Metal Slug X Super Vehicle -001

I hope it can help

Per #1, please read the updates in the first post of this topic. It sounds like those two games have some issues with hi2txt, and we should report them to GreatStone.

#2 isn't something we can really do anything about. Those games are and always were pay-to-win by design. So for those games, it's just all about it being a marathon. The developers of the games ruined scores on those games by making them pay-to-win.

[Jason Carr]

3 hours ago, xevious1974 said:

I have installed and here what I have found:

Mouse was still working and configurated

Joystick buttons was no more configurated, but I have found that start and coin (9 and 8 buttons were still working, mame default are 5 and 1 keys, so I dont understand)

Anyway I have loadad Killer Instinct and I have changed my button config, played then quitted. Reloaded and mame has saved my new buttons configurations

I have loaded Wardner and I had similar result.

Maybe:

global configuration has been kept

while specific game configuration has been deleted but it can be redone and it works

 

I hope it can help

We don't actually change any .cfg files at all, so I don't understand why they would be getting messed up. All we do is read the cfg files to make sure that the dip switches haven't been tampered with. If they have, we simply refuse to upload the high scores. Other than that, 10.14 is basically the same as previous versions, so any configuration changes shouldn't be being caused by LaunchBox.

3 hours ago, Devilquest said:

I found an issue on the game Ghouls'n Ghosts (ghouls). Just played a bit. I did not pass the first level, the boss killed me (yeah I’m that bad). But some way I got the world best score: 40,008,000.
I took 2 screenshots one from LaunchBox, other from the game score.
Now I’ve deleted the “.hi” file (ghouls.hi) and everything  works as intended. But maybe is a thing that devs may look. Or maybe add a feature to remove/reset your own high scores form the LaunchBox database.

Hope it helps.

Looks like there's another issue with that game and hi2txt. If you can report it, I'd appreciate it. Details are in the first post of this topic.

[Jason Carr]

Alright version 10.14 is out now. 10.12 and 10.13 can no longer upload high scores, and all scores have been reset. We should be good to go; time to grab some new scores guys.

Oh, btw, for anyone who hasn't seen this thread, nearly everyone voted to reset the high scores, so sorry if anyone is upset, but don't blame me.

 

[silveralex]

Question - how are clones/variants handled?

For example - I had posted a score in 1941 without a problem. I tired playing the US variant (1941u.zip) and it says it supports highscores , but it doesn't seem to load any after I play (tried twice)

[silveralex]

ah , never mind - I think just noticed the new version is out. Will download and try again

 

[Shad8]

@Jason Carr@GreatStone

After 10.14 update, Power Spikes have issues with names again.

Already reported on google sheet. Thanks

[Jason Carr]

Just now, Shad8 said:

@Jason Carr@GreatStone

After 10.14 update, Power Spikes have issues with names again.

Already reported on google sheet. Thanks

I must have missed including the updated XML in the hi2txt zip. If you update the XML, that should fix it.

[Shad8]

33 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

I must have missed including the updated XML in the hi2txt zip. If you update the XML, that should fix it.

Oh yes, you right..fixed ?

[exodus_cl]

10 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Alright version 10.14 is out now. 10.12 and 10.13 can no longer upload high scores, and all scores have been reset. We should be good to go; time to grab some new scores guys.

Oh, btw, for anyone who hasn't seen this thread, nearly everyone voted to reset the high scores, so sorry if anyone is upset, but don't blame me.

 

I updated and now the hiscore feature is not present... I have it activated in options (both options are checked) and my app is connected to the DB... no tables with high scores are shown in regular LB and no option to see high scores is available in BigBox either... 

 

I reinstalled everything from scratch and nothing happens.

 

Thanks in advance

[Jason Carr]

45 minutes ago, exodus_cl said:

I updated and now the hiscore feature is not present... I have it activated in options (both options are checked) and my app is connected to the DB... no tables with high scores are shown in regular LB and no option to see high scores is available in BigBox either... 

 

I reinstalled everything from scratch and nothing happens.

 

Thanks in advance

Most likely you're not using an official version of MAME. Unfortunately it now requires either an official or a no-nag version of MAME. MAMEUI64 is no longer supported. We added some necessary anti-cheat mechanisms which unfortunately are not compatible with other versions.

[Anaximandros]

Hello, Everyone.

I've found a bug with cyberlip rom.

I just launched the rom and then quit from the title screen (didn't start the game) but somehow i got the hiscore with the default name.

[Jason Carr]

@Anaximandros Thanks. There are a few games that still report default scores.

[Jason Carr]

For anyone interested in contributing to the hi2txt project and adding more games to support high scores, see here:

https://github.com/GreatStoneEx/hi2txt-xml

GreatStone is now allowing contributors on Github. You can also download releases to update hi2txt and support more games. Just download hi2txt.zip from the Releases section on Github, and overwrite your LaunchBox\ThirdParty\hi2txt\hi2txt.zip file.

[Jason Carr]

FYI, GreatStone is also switching it up to use the Issues section on Github (link above) instead of the spreadsheet. I'm updating the first post of this topic as well.

[exodus_cl]

15 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Most likely you're not using an official version of MAME. Unfortunately it now requires either an official or a no-nag version of MAME. MAMEUI64 is no longer supported. We added some necessary anti-cheat mechanisms which unfortunately are not compatible with other versions.

That was the issue, I was using gui version of no nag, now i'm on the "normal" version and it's ok.

One last thing! I wanted to remind you the problem of the hiscores window in lower resolutions (or vertical placed monitors) where the texts are too big, I attach the link of the post where I explained it better, thanks in advance!:
 

 

[PurpleTentacle]

So I do have an official version of MAME, but I use RetroArch with the MAME core as my default, with the official MAME as an alternative option. The high scores don't show with this setup, but I tried making a backup of my Launch Box collection & switched the default emulator to MAME, which allowed for the option to view the high scores to show up. I also noticed that it uploaded my score when using the Launch Box setup where MAME is the default, but it didn't work on my Launch Box setup when using MAME as an alternative.

 

I assume MAME has to be the default emulator for this to work? Is there any way for Launch Box to recognize that MAME is there when it's not the default? Would really help me, since I like to use RetroArch as default across platforms to keep the hotkeys & general UI consistent (and I've yet to figure out if there's an easy way to switch which monitor is being used in MAME, outside of using command lines). Also, for some reason, I couldn't get Burger Time to run using the default version of MAME, but it runs under the RetroArch MAME core, so I'm not sure if all my games run under MAME (I'm using the 0.217 MAME romset & the 0.217 version of MAME, so I'm not sure why it's not running, but that's a separate issue that I'll have to look into). Of course, I'll understand if this isn't feasible due to whatever checks Launch Box has to make to verify that a valid version of MAME is being used...

Edited April 23, 2020 by PurpleTentacle

[GreatStone]

Hello guys,

Here is a summary of what I fixed these past days (only confirmed issues related to hi2txt hi/nvram conversion to text/xml):

2020-04-23 [FIXED] "**Ghouls'n Ghosts**" and its clones: scores are now ordered correctly
2020-04-22 game: fix            "G-Darius Ver.2" (gdarius2) with a specific decoding different than gdarius, showing 5 different hiscores tables     
2020-04-21 game: fix            "Sagaia" (sagaia) to add an additional padding at the start versus darius2     
2020-04-20 game: fix            "Zero Team" (zeroteam) and "New Zero Team" (nzeroteam) to take only 4 bits for the score instead of 6     
2020-04-19 game: fix            "Space Invaders" clones are fixed: some of the 31 clones need the score to be *100, other *10, other *1     
2020-04-16 game: fix            "Power Spikes" (pspikes) decoding user name letters encoded differently than the default names     
2020-04-15 game: fix            "Dig Dug" (digdug) decoding all scores from nvram only as .hi file gets corrupted sometimes     
2020-04-15 game: fix            "Alpine ski" (alpine) using correct endianness for the score

As written by Jason, I recently opened a GitHub public repository to ease the centralization of requests and bug report (see "issues" tab):

https://github.com/GreatStoneEx/hi2txt-xml

https://github.com/GreatStoneEx/hi2txt-xml/issues

Also, if people want to contribute directly to provide fixed/new xml, they are welcome

Again, this repository is devoted to what is related to hi2txt hi/nvram conversion to text/xml:

• no launchbox issue (what is after the hiscores decoding into txt/xml, so scores upload) 
• no hiscore.dat issue (the creation of hi/nvram files)

Best regards, and good gaming session!

[xevious1974]

I know, it is a noob question, sorry.

 

I see that you can set more highscore on the same game using different..version? Like world, old, EU, and so on.

I have a complet mame merged set. Launchbox have loaded only 1 version for game. How I can play the different versions through Launchbox? I am just curious.