Savestates in Garegga and Bakraid

Frederik · Post by **Frederik** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 6:41 pm

Hey there,

During the last weeks I played Bakraid a lot and fell in love with it, even though I suck at chaining, but its always a fun quick blast seeing myself improve at my OWN scores. Gladly it automatically saves my scores in
MAME 098b.

Now Garegga and Batrider somehow don`t save my scores, so I tried to quicksave after entering my initials and to load this savestate up the next time, but when I do this everything is getting heavily messed up. Random dismembered music plays while other random sprites fly all over the screen...

Now, does other MAME releases fixed this? As I said, I now use 0.98b, and saving works fine with all the Cave games, for instance. I just wanted to ask this and if there is a solution or if Raizing games in general cause this trouble in MAME. I once tried MAME 1.0 but it said thrash like "Savestates not officially supported for this game". Whatever that is supposed to mean. Does the MAME dev team want to remember me that because, you know, you don`t offer savestates because you couldn`t save on the actual machine?

zinger · Post by **zinger** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 6:55 pm

I don't think it's fixed in the later releases. However, depending on where you saved and from where you load, it will work. Loading an in-game save state from the romcheck screen (or whatever it's called), for example, will not work though.

benj · Post by **benj** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 8:23 pm

There is a file called hiscore.dat which makes it possible to save highscores in nearly every game. I'm pretty sure it works with Garegga and Batrider. Just put it in your Mame folder, and you're set. Look for it on Mame/Emulation pages, it shouldn't be hard to find.

Frederik · Post by **Frederik** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 8:34 pm

Thanks, I will try the hiscore.dat out.

Post by **Dave_K.** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 9:13 pm

benj wrote:There is a file called hiscore.dat which makes it possible to save highscores in nearly every game. I'm pretty sure it works with Garegga and Batrider. Just put it in your Mame folder, and you're set. Look for it on Mame/Emulation pages, it shouldn't be hard to find.

No, PCB's which are not ment to save higscores, will not save highscores in mame. Barkaid DOES save highscores on my PCB after I turn it off, so this work in any version of mame. Garegga and Batrider PCBs do not save scores (along with most other Cave pcbs).

Regarding savestates, things got better after 1.02, try the latest mame version.

benj · Post by **benj** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 1:04 am

Mame.net wrote:The HISCORE.DAT file for MAME, maintained by veg and a number of outside contributors. It contains highscore saving and loading information for games that didn't actually have highscore saving and loading in the arcades.

I just tried it out on Garegga, and it works.
Check out this site.

elvis · Post by **elvis** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 1:33 am

Dave_K. wrote:No, PCB's which are not ment to save higscores, will not save highscores in mame. Barkaid DOES save highscores on my PCB after I turn it off, so this work in any version of mame. Garegga and Batrider PCBs do not save scores (along with most other Cave pcbs).

Games that save scores will generally write to either special save RAM or more generic NVRAM and provide battery backup (or more recently use flash RAM).

Games that don't save scores write only to working RAM, which is flushed when you power down.

MAME emulates NVRAM just fine. Check your "nvram" folder to see all the games that have used it and dumped the RAM image there.

Hiscore.dat is a hack which is game specific, and requires mini-drivers (handled by the .dat file itself). These look at very specific parts of the working RAM and save only those (unlike savestates which take a snapshot of the whole lot). When MAME fires up at a different point, the highscore.dat injects just the scores into the working RAM.

Of note, you can hack your hiscore.dat easily with a hex editor to artificially create false highscores. But as we all know, real gamers don't cheat.

I LOVE the hiscore.dat feature of MAME, and use it in all my cabs. Considering shmupping is all about score, it's a godsend.

Post by **Dave_K.** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 4:02 am

Ahh, thanks for the clarification benj and elvis.

Frederik · Post by **Frederik** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 11:05 am

You guys know everything.

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 5:58 pm

Ah, I was thinking about looking into highscores...now I know what to do! Thanks for saving me a bunch of time, guys.

zaphod · Post by **zaphod** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 10:25 pm

Support for highscore.dat was removed from MAME. that's why it stopped working for you.

THe reason is that pirates were making mamre cabs and used teh highscore.dat ceafeature to save the state of the credit counter to let you switch games and keep unused credits.

Frederik · Post by **Frederik** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 11:30 pm

Well, I thought it was more about the whole "accuracy" thing that they removed hiscore savings, from what I read here:

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/mameover.htm

I am not really following the whole Mame developing bussiness, I just grabbed a random version and it played most shmups I had.

Besides, the stuff that this british games journalist writes I highly readable.
And guess what his favourite game of the year 2005 is -

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.c ... aiden3.htm

Smraedis · Post by **Smraedis** » Tue Mar 14, 2006 1:53 am

from what I see, hiscore.dat updates are being done after every new mame release now, and if you get that version of the hiscore file, the scores should be saved now.

I don't really use the hiscore feature much now, but it does seem to work if you get the updated hiscore file now.