New MAME High Score feature!

[angerman]

yep ...I cant get any high scors from that game .....

 

[Johnny T]

6 minutes ago, angerman said:

yep ...I cant get any high scors from that game .....

 

Thanks angerman... at least it's not just me ?

[Retro808]

Probably might want to post in the official Mame high score troubleshooting thread. Also take a look at the first page for some steps Jason put out.

[Tronads]

Can I just clarify...what are the rules on amending the dip switch settings. I like to set mine to Twin Galaxies settings and some of mine are wrong, like my 1942 is set to 2 lives. I daren't change them now as I don't want to invalidate any or all of my scores by doing so. Am I allowed to ?

[Jason Carr]

On 4/25/2020 at 5:18 AM, 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.

The more games you "place" in, the higher you'll be on the leaderboards, and of course placing higher up improves your leaderboard position as well. We don't just add up all your scores. We focus on your placement on individual game leaderboards, count them up, and then calculate your position.

21 hours ago, Johnny T said:

My score has disappeared!!

 

The high scores were reset (just this once), because the community voted to reset them:

 

[Jason Carr]

20 hours ago, angerman said:

yep ...I cant get any high scors from that game .....

 

 

20 hours ago, Johnny T said:

Thanks angerman... at least it's not just me ?

Yes, please take a look at the first post from the troubleshooting thread above. Post your log files and we can help you troubleshoot.

[Jason Carr]

3 hours ago, Tronads said:

Can I just clarify...what are the rules on amending the dip switch settings. I like to set mine to Twin Galaxies settings and some of mine are wrong, like my 1942 is set to 2 lives. I daren't change them now as I don't want to invalidate any or all of my scores by doing so. Am I allowed to ?

If you change any dip switch settings at all, you risk invalidating your scores for that game. I would recommend not touching them at all if you have high scores uploading turned on.

[Johnny T]

@Jason Carr I've just sorted it now. I 

disconnected from the launchbox database and reconnected and synced games. 

Then played Frogger but still had the same problem. But it occurred to me that although I got a high score on the global rankings it wasn't a high score on my own Frogger high score table. So... Deleted my Frogger high score file and played again. Got a high score on my own table which then uploaded correctly to the global high score table. 

I'm guessing the code is looking for a change to the hiscore file in order to decide whether to upload or not? 

Anyhoo.. sorted now - thanks for everything as always ?

[Jason Carr]

4 minutes ago, Johnny T said:

@Jason Carr I've just sorted it now. I 

disconnected from the launchbox database and reconnected and synced games. 

Then played Frogger but still had the same problem. But it occurred to me that although I got a high score on the global rankings it wasn't a high score on my own Frogger high score table. So... Deleted my Frogger high score file and played again. Got a high score on my own table which then uploaded correctly to the global high score table. 

I'm guessing the code is looking for a change to the hiscore file in order to decide whether to upload or not? 

Anyhoo.. sorted now - thanks for everything as always ?

Yes, if you don't add a new score to the in-game high score table, then nothing will upload.

[Johnny T]

2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Yes, if you don't add a new score to the in-game high score table, then nothing will upload.

Yep. Had the same on Galaxians too. I'll just delete all my high scores and start again. It's no bother ?

[Tronads]

Things are a little unpredictable for me. I just got 93k on Donkey Kong 3, escaped out of the game, my score appeared in second place. I went straight back into the game and had another go, and got 125k...escaped out, expecting to see myself at the top, and nothing...no upload of the second score.
The only thing I can think of is I changed the mapping of the fire button to a different button on my joystick, but surely that wouldn't have caused the score not to upload ? (I did do "change keys (this game)", rather than globally.

 

Edit, just deleted the hi and cfg files and played again, and this one went up. Not sure what one did it, or if it needed both.

 

Edited April 26, 2020 by Tronads

[Jason Carr]

7 hours ago, Tronads said:

Things are a little unpredictable for me. I just got 93k on Donkey Kong 3, escaped out of the game, my score appeared in second place. I went straight back into the game and had another go, and got 125k...escaped out, expecting to see myself at the top, and nothing...no upload of the second score.
The only thing I can think of is I changed the mapping of the fire button to a different button on my joystick, but surely that wouldn't have caused the score not to upload ? (I did do "change keys (this game)", rather than globally.

 

Edit, just deleted the hi and cfg files and played again, and this one went up. Not sure what one did it, or if it needed both.

 

If you can post us the log file, we can look to see what might have or be happening. Unfortunately we don't have anything to go by without it, so we can't fix anything. The high scores are especially complicated, because there are four layers: LaunchBox, then hi2txt, then the MAME high scores plugin, and then MAME. The log file will help us to identify where the problem occurred. It's most likely a game-specific issue, but we can't say for sure without looking at the log file.

[Joe35car]

I'm very new to LB. Been using Hyperspin forever and this MAME High Score feature made me dust off the cobwebs and play some classic games. Thanks for this feature.

[flatuswalrus]

7 minutes ago, Joe35car said:

I'm very new to LB. Been using Hyperspin forever and this MAME High Score feature made me dust off the cobwebs and play some classic games. Thanks for this feature.

Playing to beat the high score on a game can be fun and in an arcade where the score left on the machines is from other people makes you want to beat them more. Though this exact, specific way when you are actively competing against others in the community just makes it so much more fun. I have been playing way more than before because of this one feature alone, it ridiculously awesome!

[Jason Carr]

Great to hear guys. It's definitely a feature I've enjoyed a lot myself as well.

[SonicFan53]

38 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Great to hear guys. It's definitely a feature I've enjoyed a lot myself as well.

B e l i e v e m e , I would've never played Defender, Flicky or Galaxian if it hadn't been for this feature!

[Johnny T]

I'm now third? on Toki and I'm somewhere around 6th on Frogger. Some of the top scores are amazing. Agreed that this is the an amazing USP for LB and, when word gets out, should be a massive draw for new players looking for a brilliant front end.

Edited May 3, 2020 by Johnny T
Corrected on my Toki position :-)

[nullgolem]

On 4/22/2020 at 12:32 AM, PanteraZombie said:

RetroAchievements aren't new, they have been integrated into LaunchBox for a while now... but I just recently looked into the RetroAchievements games database and went through the tedious process of manually creating playlists per platform for games that support it. They basically work just like PlayStation trophies or Xbox achievements... except for retro games through emulators. It works with several platforms primarily through RetroArch, although it looks like they are supported through a few other emulators... but I haven't messed with any of those. You can view your RetroAchievements in BigBox and the Pause Menu now too, which is really cool. It adds so much more to my setup, similar to the new High Score Leaderboard system. Here is a tutorial for it...

I hope this doesnt offend anyone but I think that MAME scores and having my RA in LB is one of my favorite updates to LB in the past year. It really has enhanced the way I play older games. Seeing that either one of those are available tempts me to launch it!

However, there is something I REALLY would like to see in LB that might not be too difficult and that is if we could have an update where the way RA works is actually like MAME and gets it's own field. Currently RA just shows up on the sidebar because it pulls it to display but if LB could somehow have an actual field for RA Is supported. The reason that would be nice is because then I could make playlists for it, or have them all show up at once.

But let's think about playlists. It seems the next step would be to actually have LB tell you more than just whether there is support for these things or not (Y/N) but if it could report the score you could do quite a bit. You could then make playlists for both MAME and RA (is MAME HIGH SCORE >, < or = to 0, etc) and same for RA ( IS GAME Retro Score % <. >, = 0) then we could use LB to generator RA Achievement lists (Completed, Incomplete) and MAME leaderboards Because then you could use LB to keep tally on when you fall behind or when someone beats your position for 1st on centipede and whatnot!

[Johnny T]

Sounds like a great idea (assuming it's not a major headache to implement). Would be one for Jason to add to the poll if it's do-able I think ?

[Jason Carr]

23 hours ago, nullgolem said:

I hope this doesnt offend anyone but I think that MAME scores and having my RA in LB is one of my favorite updates to LB in the past year. It really has enhanced the way I play older games. Seeing that either one of those are available tempts me to launch it!

However, there is something I REALLY would like to see in LB that might not be too difficult and that is if we could have an update where the way RA works is actually like MAME and gets it's own field. Currently RA just shows up on the sidebar because it pulls it to display but if LB could somehow have an actual field for RA Is supported. The reason that would be nice is because then I could make playlists for it, or have them all show up at once.

But let's think about playlists. It seems the next step would be to actually have LB tell you more than just whether there is support for these things or not (Y/N) but if it could report the score you could do quite a bit. You could then make playlists for both MAME and RA (is MAME HIGH SCORE >, < or = to 0, etc) and same for RA ( IS GAME Retro Score % <. >, = 0) then we could use LB to generator RA Achievement lists (Completed, Incomplete) and MAME leaderboards Because then you could use LB to keep tally on when you fall behind or when someone beats your position for 1st on centipede and whatnot!

Thanks @nullgolem. Unfortunately the current Retro Achievements API doesn't really allow us to do a whole lot more with the Retro Achievements data. We could maintain a local copy of the data, but it would easily get out of date, so could be cause for lots of issues. The API currently doesn't allow for any kind of batch download of the data, and if we tried to just force it, we could end up bringing down the Retro Achievements servers. The Retro Achievements team is working on improvements to the API, but we're not sure when they'll be released.

For the MAME high scores, we could implement those things for custom playlists, yes, though we would need to add a lot of pieces for it. I do really like that idea though.