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[0.189] Hi Score Support

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 9:50 am
by Graham
Hi All

I've noticed that some games (i.e Bubble Bobble) don't save the hi score by default. To get around this, I have enabled "Automatic save/restore" under State/Playback Options. However, this doesn't seem to apply to Hellfire. Is this a bug as I would have thought this should have worked for every game. If not, is there anything else that can be done to improve hi score support?

Also, whilst we are around this area, could someone explain what "Bilinear Support" and "Burn-in" do? I should also mention that I'm using the Ubuntu version on Mame (latest is 0.189) if that makes any difference.

:)

Re: [0.189] Hi Score Support

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 11:18 am
by mhoes
Whether a game supports high score saving ('by default') or not depends on whether the original hardware supports it after power down (and internally saves it somewhere in non-volatile ram/storage). Because every time you 'start/stop' a game in MAME, you are really powering up/down the entire machine. So if the original hardware did not save it somewhere, that information is lost at power down (when you stop the game).

'Save states' are a way to get around that, by having MAME (and not the machine itself) save the machine's state on disk, to be restored by MAME when you restart the game (and the machine powers up again). Support for save states needs to be added explicitly to every specific driver in MAME; it's not a system/MAME-wide thing. For some games/drivers this support has been added, but not for others. It looks like that support has not been added for Hellfire. Unfortunately there is no way to change that, apart from hoping this will be added in the future, or adding/writing the required code yourself.

Re: [0.189] Hi Score Support

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 1:09 pm
by Graham
Hi mhoes

Thanks for the quick reply :). I was aware some of the older games didn't have this feature but didn't realise save states were per game, so thanks for confirming this.

:)