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Graham
Posts: 61
Joined: Thu Jun 30, 2016 7:49 pm

Mame Plugins

Hi All

Could someone please explain how Plugins work in Mame? I have enabled "Hiscore support" and noticed that "Data plugin" is already enabled. What does Data plugin do? Are high scores now saved in a different folder/file?

:)
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Robert
Posts: 99
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Re: Mame Plugins

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Last edited by Robert on Fri Sep 23, 2022 2:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Graham
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Re: Mame Plugins

Robert wrote: Mon Sep 09, 2019 3:23 pmData plugin enables the display of history.dat, mameinfo.dat and so on.
Thanks for confirming the above.
Hopefully someone can explain highscores for you.
I have since found this folder (hi) outside of Mame, within my home folder. Each game is saved as <romname>.hi . If possible, I would like to change this location within Mame.

:)
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Tafoid
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Re: Mame Plugins

Graham wrote: Mon Sep 09, 2019 9:39 pm
Robert wrote: Mon Sep 09, 2019 3:23 pmData plugin enables the display of history.dat, mameinfo.dat and so on.
Thanks for confirming the above.
Hopefully someone can explain highscores for you.
I have since found this folder (hi) outside of Mame, within my home folder. Each game is saved as <romname>.hi . If possible, I would like to change this location within Mame.

:)

I believe to change the "hi" folder location, you'll need to edit the plugins/hiscore/init.lua file and change the location listed for the variable "hiscore_path". You do this, though, at your own peril. Just keep a backup of the file somewhere to retain the normal behavior.
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Graham
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Re: Mame Plugins

Is there any documentation that explains about these plugins? I'm interested in what the "console" plugin may do.

:)
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Stiletto
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Re: Mame Plugins

Graham wrote: Fri Jan 03, 2020 6:42 pm Is there any documentation that explains about these plugins? I'm interested in what the "console" plugin may do.

:)
The console plugin opens up a Lua console window from where you can manipulate a running MAME instance.

Lua is a scripting language: http://www.lua.org/
The console lets you interact with the emulation while it's running using scripting commands.

In addition, all the plugins are Lua scripts.

There's some minimal documentation here:
https://docs.mamedev.org/techspecs/luaengine.html

The best documentation on the plugins is their source themselves (they're scripts, they're not compiled), both the ones that come with MAME as well as various third-party projects. They make calls to a "MAME API" which is, as of yet, conventionally undocumented.
Descriptions of this API can be found inside https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/ma ... engine.cpp in the comments.
Here's a 2018 export of the comments (outdated): https://pastebin.com/hYW4hCmA

For example, here's a Super Mario Brothers machine learning player script for MAME, based on MarI/O:
https://gist.github.com/cracyc/02cbcac7 ... 0ef6c77fa5

And here's a similar neural network script for Street Fighter II: https://github.com/Jazpy/RYUNATOR

There's lots of possibilities!
- Stiletto

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