New MAME High Score feature!

[Brian221]

Resolved!  Clearing the /hi folder did the trick...but I was hasty trying to fix it earlier, and had renamed the highscore.dat file in plugins.  All good now! 

[Jason Carr]

12 minutes ago, Rastan350 said:

I am using mameui64 0.193. Not sure if that is considered official but if not what should I use, mame64 0.193? Also to add I did have it working on 10.13. Could see and upload, but I know that doesn't mean it should work in 10.14.

MAMEUI64 does no longer work with 10.14. That was on purpose in order to prevent some forms of cheating. Our apologies for that; you will need an official version of MAME or MAME no-nag for the high scores to work going forward.

[Rastan350]

21 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

MAMEUI64 does no longer work with 10.14. That was on purpose in order to prevent some forms of cheating. Our apologies for that; you will need an official version of MAME or MAME no-nag for the high scores to work going forward.

Thanks, I switched to mame64 and am now up and working.

[NinjaBadger]

It'd be great if there was a brief pop up when loading a rom to let you know if high score uploading has been disabled.  I.e high score uploading disabled due to dip switch settings.

 

That way you can avoid spending time to get an awesome score only to realise it's not going to count.

[coreyhustle]

5 hours ago, NinjaBadger said:

It'd be great if there was a brief pop up when loading a rom to let you know if high score uploading has been disabled.  I.e high score uploading disabled due to dip switch settings.

 

That way you can avoid spending time to get an awesome score only to realise it's not going to count.

Just go into the cfg folder inside your MAME folder and delete your config files for the games you are worried about. It just takes a couple minutes. It would be a huge bummer to set a great score only for it not to count.

 

[PopeyeMachine]

I'm confused. I lost my Track and Field high score with the community reset, and when I went back to try and put up a new one today, it didn't register. Do I have to delete BOTH the .hi and .cfg files in my MAME folder (I'm on an official MAME build)?

[Jason Carr]

13 hours ago, NinjaBadger said:

It'd be great if there was a brief pop up when loading a rom to let you know if high score uploading has been disabled.  I.e high score uploading disabled due to dip switch settings.

 

That way you can avoid spending time to get an awesome score only to realise it's not going to count.

That would make sense, but high scores can be disabled due to cheating or tampering at any point during the game startup, runtime, or shutdown. So we couldn't guarantee it if we did something like that. I do agree though that some type of GUI explaining things (outside of the log file) would be nice. But yeah, you shouldn't have to worry about anything if you haven't and don't mess with the dip switches (or just delete the .cfg files if you have).

8 minutes ago, PopeyeMachine said:

I'm confused. I lost my Track and Field high score with the community reset, and when I went back to try and put up a new one today, it didn't register. Do I have to delete BOTH the .hi and .cfg files in my MAME folder (I'm on an official MAME build)?

You have to register a new score on the high scores board in-game in order for a new high score to be set. If all your high scores are too high, you can delete the .hi file from the MAME\hi folder, as well as the game's folder from the MAME\nvram folder. You only need to delete or change .cfg files if you've tampered with dip switch settings.

[PopeyeMachine]

1 hour ago, PopeyeMachine said:

I'm confused. I lost my Track and Field high score with the community reset, and when I went back to try and put up a new one today, it didn't register. Do I have to delete BOTH the .hi and .cfg files in my MAME folder (I'm on an official MAME build)?

Found the issue...I habitually use the Track and Field dip switch option to reset world records on reset (it's the only way to have the 100 yd dash and hurdles world records store correctly). This was enough to get my score reporting blocked. Cleared all the nvram/.hi/.cfg files and tried it vanilla and it worked! Time for another run and see if I can get my 200k back!

[Jason Carr]

1 hour ago, PopeyeMachine said:

Found the issue...I habitually use the Track and Field dip switch option to reset world records on reset (it's the only way to have the 100 yd dash and hurdles world records store correctly). This was enough to get my score reporting blocked. Cleared all the nvram/.hi/.cfg files and tried it vanilla and it worked! Time for another run and see if I can get my 200k back!

Yup, makes sense. Any changed dipswitches will unfortunately invalidate all scores for that game.

[flatuswalrus]

Wait, there was a community reset? I just opened LB and all my scores were gone. Why did everything get wiped?

[Jason Carr]

8 minutes ago, flatuswalrus said:

Wait, there was a community reset? I just opened LB and all my scores were gone. Why did everything get wiped?

The community voted to reset the high scores, just this once. See here:

 

[flatuswalrus]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

The community voted to reset the high scores, just this once. See here

That sucks as I had some terrific scores but that is understandable and fair enough, thanks for the reply.

[rommaster]

Confused also ?

Couple days ago high scores feature was working fine, now it's not showing against any gamed at all? I've reconnected to cloud and unticked/re-ticked the mame upload/download scores boxes.

I'm using core 'Arcade (MAME)' in retroarch, this is the latest GIT build, currently 0.188 

[neil9000]

1 minute ago, nicr4wks said:

I'm using core 'Arcade (MAME)' in retroarch, this is the latest GIT build, currently 0.188

Retroarch has never been supported for this feature, and wont be going forward either. You will need to use the official MAME for hiscores. https://www.mamedev.org/

[Jason Carr]

4 hours ago, nicr4wks said:

Confused also ?

Couple days ago high scores feature was working fine, now it's not showing against any gamed at all? I've reconnected to cloud and unticked/re-ticked the mame upload/download scores boxes.

I'm using core 'Arcade (MAME)' in retroarch, this is the latest GIT build, currently 0.188 

Apparently it was working under Retroarch in some circumstances with the previous releases, but we had issues with it because we couldn't prevent some forms of cheating. So yes, unfortunately you'll need an official or a no-nag version of MAME in order to use high scores going forward.

[flatuswalrus]

On 4/20/2020 at 11:53 PM, Johnny T said:

Well stay away from my Frogger high score!! (And my Toki high score too whilst we're on the subject) ?

I know the high scores were reset but I could not see your username on there beforehand. What is your username on the Games Database?

[flatuswalrus]

Only for my own curiosity, can someone who knows tell me how the MAME High Scores work? As in, how is the overall ladder organised? Is there a particular algorithm or just overall score? I imagine it would not be overall score as some games score dramatically different from others. As well, how was it decided what games were compatible initially? Is it a lot of work to add new games and is this something the community can help with? As I said, those questions are just out of curiosity if anyone would be kind enough to answer, thanks.

[Johnny T]

5 hours ago, flatuswalrus said:

I know the high scores were reset but I could not see your username on there beforehand. What is your username on the Games Database?

It's just Johnny T. Should be in there? Going up the "pub" (read: shed) in about 10 minute's... Will check..... ?

[Johnny T]

6 hours ago, flatuswalrus said:

Only for my own curiosity, can someone who knows tell me how the MAME High Scores work? As in, how is the overall ladder organised? Is there a particular algorithm or just overall score? I imagine it would not be overall score as some games score dramatically different from others. As well, how was it decided what games were compatible initially? Is it a lot of work to add new games and is this something the community can help with? As I said, those questions are just out of curiosity if anyone would be kind enough to answer, thanks.

My score has disappeared!!

 

[Johnny T]

Frogger has stopped recording my high scores now :-(.