Cataloging High Score Via Emulators?

[Ze_ro]

After all my experiences with the high score club and such, I'm curious if anyone has ever looked into adding support for cataloging high scores into any of the 2600 emulators out there. Anyone who has much experience with MAME surely knows about the cheat.dat file which tells MAME what memory locations the game holds it's high scores at, and how to handle them... would something like this be possible in Stella or Z26? Some games actually keep track of your most recent score AND your high score, so it could work the same way for those games, but unfortunately most just keep track of your most recent score... so even if an emulator could keep track of your high scores, it would likely have to display them somehow, which I guess is where things get complicated...

 

--Zero

[+stephena]

After all my experiences with the high score club and such, I'm curious if anyone has ever looked into adding support for cataloging high scores into any of the 2600 emulators out there.

 

Someone made this suggestion for Stella years ago (perhaps it was you ), but there never seemed to be a real need for it. Or more appropriately, it never seemed worth the effort because so few people would make use of it.

 

Anyone who has much experience with MAME surely knows about the cheat.dat file which tells MAME what memory locations the game holds it's high scores at, and how to handle them... would something like this be possible in Stella or Z26?  

 

Probably doable, but it would mean someone had to figure it out for every ROM out there ...

 

Some games actually keep track of your most recent score AND your high score, so it could work the same way for those games, but unfortunately most just keep track of your most recent score... so even if an emulator could keep track of your high scores, it would likely have to display them somehow, which I guess is where things get complicated...

 

Stella has the limited (for now) ability to display a minimal GUI in the form of messageboxes and menus. These GUI items will be expanded in the future. So displaying the info would be easy, even with the current limitations.

 

The real problem I see is (a) getting the byte location of scores for every ROM in existence and then maintaining it, and (b) having the emulation know when a game has ended.

 

For example, say you play a game and then die Do this a few more times and then the game is over. At that point (and only at that point) should the score be recorded. So we'd need some sort of hooks into the emulation to know when a game ended. How does one know that? What constitutes a game ending? In other words, what general algorithm could be used to know when a game ends.

 

And then there's the issue of what to do with the score. Do you want to be able to upload it to other computers? If so, that brings networking support with it, and none of the 2600 emulators do that ATM.

 

Then there's the issue of accuracy. If the score is simply saved in a file, what's to stop someone from editing that file and changing the score? If you want to encrypt it, that brings encryption algorithms into the code ...

 

So, from my POV, while it could be done, I don't know if it's worth the effort. In any case, I'd need help to do it. Contributers are welcome

 

Steve

[Ze_ro]

The real problem I see is (a) getting the byte location of scores for every ROM in existence and then maintaining it

True enough... I guess that would take quite a bit of dedication to maintain. I don't think Atari 2600 roms are quite as standardized as MAME roms, so I guess there would be a problem with keeping lists for [a]'s, 's, and such, even though the address are likely the same. It would likely be a lot easier to find the score location in memory though since there is so little memory to search through. Not many 2600 games actually ask for your initials though, so I guess they'd either have to be omitted entirely or done within the emulator, which would be much more complicated.

 

and (b) having the emulation know when a game has ended.

Perhaps this is naive, since I'm not 100% sure how each game saves it's scores in memory, but wouldn't it be easiest just to monitor the memory location for changes? ie, keep a value cached so that if the score is reset to zero or the game is exited, then save the cached value as a high score. I guess this would sort of screw up any attempt to save scores after a rollover though. I'm also not sure how that could be applied to games that use a time rather than a score.

 

And then there's the issue of what to do with the score.  Do you want to be able to upload it to other computers?

Well, I hadn't really thought of doing anything beyond keeping track of scores for personal reference really... essentially, no more than what MAME does with it's high scores. Online high score lists would be definitely interesting, but would certainly require a lot of work.

 

--Zero