LTO Flashcart and Storing High Scores

[Bamse]

So, iv'e seen in one of the right click menus of the GUI that you can activate flash memory for individual roms and I assume this is so you can save high scores. I tried this for a game but although I could activate it, it doesn't save the scores.

 

Is this because it only works with specific roms or am I doing something wrong?

 

Thanks

[+intvsteve]

No, that is not the purpose of those menu options.

 

The LTO Flash! does not offer such capability.

 

Let me try to explain what you see, why it is there, and why it cannot work as you wish it did. (I agree it would be really neat if such capability were feasible.)

 

1, What are you seeing?

You must have been using the "Edit ROM Features..." menu. The origins of this predate LTO Flash! by a couple of years. The ROM list management part of the UI software started as a project to create a UI to run ROMs in jzintv. It was meant as a way to 'automagically' figure out the command line arguments to send to jzintv.

 

2. Why is this present?

There are many options you can see in the "Edit ROM Features..." menu. Even though we try our best, we cannot automatically identify every ROM file, nor what the requirements are to run that ROM either in an emulator or via LTO Flash!. For example, some games require the ECS. This may or may not be defined in a .CFG file if you are using a .BIN-format ROM. It almost never is described correctly in a .ROM-format ROM. The UI software will use this information to send the right arguments to jzintv if you choose to run a ROM in jzintv. The LTO Flash! may use this information to enable or disable the ECS ROM in hardware. For example, Pac-Man by AtariSoft is incompatible with the ECS. LTO Flash! uses the 'incompatible' setting for that ROM to know to disable the ECS, depending on cartridge settings.

 

Another example closer to what you are trying, is for ROMs that specifically use or require JLP flash memory or accelerators. jzintv requires special arguments for such ROMs to work - so the emulator knows to enable the additional JLP hardware emulation. If such descriptions are not defined for a ROM that requires JLP features, then they may not be enabled in LTO Flash!'s firmware when it loads that game.

 

Early in 2018, intvnut expanded the capabilities of "features" that can be supported in the .ROM format as well as the .CFG file, and brought these into a much better level of parity. Now if you convert ROM formats between .ROM and .BIN, the "round trip" should not be lossy.

 

Much of this is really a side effect of the development of LTO Flash! itself. During that development, we had many discussions about how to describe the features of different ROMs, what the cartridge could do to make it easier to use your full suite of Intellivision hardware without needing to continuously connect and disconnect peripherals, etc.

 

3. Why will changing these settings not work?

These "settings" only describe the capabilities of a ROM -- they cannot add any new features to the ROM.

 

Again -- because ROMs sometimes do not have all of the proper descriptions of their abilities, the UI offers a way to store this information in the list of ROMs. The UI will never modify your ROM files in any way.

 

 

--

 

I think this has been discussed before, but I'll try to summarize again.... It is possible for emulators to do all kinds of wonderful and interesting things like have complete system save / restore state because the emulator controls the entire "universe" of the system. This is entirely different when running in actual hardware. Every game is, in theory, implemented in an entirely different way. For example, the score of a game is stored somewhere in RAM, but not in a standard place. Perhaps games that use the EXEC all use the same memory location. Perhaps games in IntyBASIC use a somewhat standard location for storing scores... but it's completely arbitrary.

 

Hope this helps.

[Bamse]

That helps completely and was very informative and educational.

Thank you for taking the time to write that, it's very much appreciated :-)

[Intymike]

But, there are now new games which have save features. And when they get a ROM release, like GOSUB, you can use this feature on the LTO Flash!

[Bamse]

I see. Thanks Mike