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HiToText (Hi score support)


Fyrecrypts

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Thanks so much for your work on this dudes,HiToText combined with HyperSpin has made my cabinet's dreams come true,all at once.You talent & hard work is hugely appreciated,i'm getting better scores by the day,such an extra incentive.Brillo.Cheers to everyone involved.

Oh yeah...........

I don't wanna be too cheeky,but if i could request one game to be added to HiToText,it's gotta be Track & Field.Probably my all time most played game (it hurts to type this).

Again,massive thanks to everyone involved,it's never game over.

Thank you , I appreciate the compliments, and am very glad people are getting enjoyment out of HiToText. As for Track and Field, it's deciphered however, it's got extra score chart stuff such as individual games' world records. I've delayed implementing this, as it is going to be difficult. I think I've come up with a solution, and am hoping that I can have this type of game support for the next version.

When that happens, many games will become supported pretty much immediately: Cameltry, Moon Patrol, X-men Vs. Street Fighter, All of Defender, Smash TV, and so on...

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  • 2 weeks later...
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New version out today with loads of new stuff, mostly concerning what I call alternate scores. This is used mostly with secondary scores like Track and Field's individual event records, or Moon Patrol's checkpoint record times. I don't believe any FE has made use of these yet, but at least there's now a process that can be used to incorporate these scores into HiToText.

There are new commands that use the alternate scores: -ra which reads the entire hi score table, including alternate scores and displays that. NOTE: -r will work the same and only show the main hiscore table so FE devs don't need to worry about this version breaking their hi score features. -wa will write an alternate score using the same basic format as -w however it takes an additional parameter that is the name of the alternate score table you wish to modify. -fa will display the format for these alternate scores so you can have the parameters necessary to write an alternate score. I suggest using a -ra first so you can see the displayed format as well.

I've added new games as well: Darius Gaiden - Silver Hawk (missing nice looking zone data though), Outzone, Track and Field, Centipede, X-men Vs. Street Fighter, Crazy Climber, Millipede, Moon Cresta, Moon Patrol (Finally! Although sill a little incomplete, more on that below), and Arkanoid. In addition I modified Phoenix to use Cananas' new hiscore.dat entry.

Crazy Climber, Moon Cresta, Phoenix, and all their supported hacks/clones all use Cananas' new hiscore.dat entries as well, so if you have scores for those games and want to save them, be sure to have a screenshot or jot down the scores first, then delete the old .hi file for that particular game. Rerun that game with the new hiscore.dat in place, to generate a new .hi file. Then use HiToText to reinsert those scores.

Darius Gaiden - Silver Hawk has an interesting display for showing the stages you've visited, and I'd like that to show up as shown in game, however I have not cracked the algorithm used yet, and certainly haven't found the time to find every single combination of zone routes yet. So it'll just show zones as the actual byte value found in the .hi file.

I've also fixed a minor bug with Ghosts N'Goblins where the rank was displaying incorrectly.

The new HiToText, and new hiscore.dat will be uploaded shortly in the main post at BYOAC. Enjoy!

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One of my all time favorites and without high scores what the point of replaying? makes it so much better and addictive !!

but it does not save them automatically ?

"Crazy Climber, Moon Cresta, Phoenix, and all their supported hacks/clones all use Cananas' new hiscore.dat entries as well, so if you have scores for those games and want to save them, be sure to have a screenshot or jot down the scores first, then delete the old .hi file for that particular game. Rerun that game with the new hiscore.dat in place, to generate a new .hi file. Then use HiToText to reinsert those scores"

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One of my all time favorites and without high scores what the point of replaying? makes it so much better and addictive !!

but it does not save them automatically ?

"Crazy Climber, Moon Cresta, Phoenix, and all their supported hacks/clones all use Cananas' new hiscore.dat entries as well, so if you have scores for those games and want to save them, be sure to have a screenshot or jot down the scores first, then delete the old .hi file for that particular game. Rerun that game with the new hiscore.dat in place, to generate a new .hi file. Then use HiToText to reinsert those scores"

All of those games use new entries in the hiscore.dat so the .hi file is different, they'll still save scores, but if you have scores you want to save when you use the new hiscore.dat (which you need to do to use the latest HiToText), then you will have to reinsert your old scores into the new .hi file.

It's kinda complicated, but I hope it makes sense. =)

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Quickly put out another release with support for Tetris and Zookeeper. Zookeeper looks like it has two hi score tables, however it just acts as one big hi score table, so that's how I'm treating it.

I also added support for an update flag, HiToText -u "[ReferrerName]" is the usage, where ReferrerName is just something I'm using to track a few statistics. My hope is that when the FE people use that command to try and update HiToText, they just put in the name of their FE for ReferrerName. The command will display a URL to the most up-to-date HiToText, or will send "No newer version available." to the console if that version of HiToText is the latest. This method could also throw an exception prepended with "Error:". I would expect this to occur when there are network issues.

Note: The -u command will not actually download the new HiToText if available, it will only display the URL to get it. I will let the FE devs determine how they wish to update HiToText themselves. I have a few reasons for this, I don't want to make HiToText into more than just a single executible, and I want to allow the FE devs to determine when/how to update HiToText if they find a new version available.

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  • 2 weeks later...
I can see about adding the u option to my next run at programming in HQ. Will be a bit due to side project, but will be done.

I look forward to it Bill. I think I'll have to add something for updating the hiscore.dat file as well, because that seems to change just as often.

Also I have a new version out. Mostly just some new games and some modifications to the hiscore.dat file for the games Cananas decoded a while back (005, and 8 Ball Action), and Alien Syndrome which was incorrectly omitting the 7th place coins value.

Other games included are Paperboy, Gauntlet/Gauntlet 2, and Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo. Paperboy is a little strange, so those of you wanting to add scores through HiToText will need to know that you cannot add a normal hi score, you must add an alternate score for either easy, middle, or hard. Paperboy actually grabs the top 10 scores from the combined 30 scores shown for the 3 difficulties to make up the Grand Slam scores.

Again, similarly to previous version if you have old scores you want to save for 005, 8 Ball Action, or Alien Syndrome you will need to follow the steps I've outlined numerous times in my previous posts.

Enjoy!

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  • 2 weeks later...
You know what would be cool is to distribute a pack of default hi score files for people with fresh installs of mame. That way the scores show up no matter what. So evertime you have a new release you can include new hi files, or have something built in.

That's pretty easily done, and I see the benefit. It will take me some time to get a bunch of blank ones, all of mine have scores. ;)

I never did post to say thanks. This is really sweet. Been using it since .129.

I was going to get the newest version, but it looks like the server may be down on your BYOAC thread? FYI, I figure it'll be fixed shortly

Thanks glad you're enjoying it. =)

As for the attachment problem, I believe they BYOAC guys are aware of it, and are looking for solutions. In the meantime, I posted a few links over on my post there that have the new versions of what you need.

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i thought there already was a 'world hi-score dat' . cpwizard will pull up 2 versions: 'hi scores' and 'my hi scores'. I don't know if it's saving it as a different dat or what. but it would be cool to distribute the 'hi scores' (world record version) as default, and if you play a game it will write to 'my hi scores' and then show that one in HS or have the choice

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i thought there already was a 'world hi-score dat' . cpwizard will pull up 2 versions: 'hi scores' and 'my hi scores'. I don't know if it's saving it as a different dat or what. but it would be cool to distribute the 'hi scores' (world record version) as default, and if you play a game it will write to 'my hi scores' and then show that one in HS or have the choice

There is a global hiscore.dat, however it has bugs that I see much more than someone who isn't trying to determine what every single byte saved is for. Things like missing the 10th place round byte, which happens about 1 in every 5 games deciphered. I mail these changes to Leezer (the guy running the official hiscore.dat) and he'll update his version with the bug fixes and additions we find.

Distributing world record hi scores might take some time, that I just don't have, but using HiToText it's doable, just insert all the highest scores one by one. =)

As for the difference in CPWizard between hi scores and my hi scores, my hi scores uses the .hi files on your machine, whereas hi scores is actually reading the data from the story.dat file in CPWizard's data folder.

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I would like to make a small request, but since this is my first post i would like to send out a few thanks first.

First of all i would to thank BBB for making such a top notch frontend and single-handedly getting me back into the mame scene. Second i would like to thank Fyrecrypts for thinking of this cool idea and making it a reality, and last but not least i would like to thank the community, after jumping in and out of the mame scene for close to 10 years i'm glad to see that emulation support is still alive and thriving!

Now on to my request, knowing that i have ZERO programming knowledge i'm not sure how hard or easy this would be to do, but its just an idea. I was thinking it would be pretty neat if you could have the 1st 2nd and 3rd place scores in gold silver and bronze respectively. Maybe have 1st place in a bigger font and make it bold or something to that effect or have little mame trophies beside the names.

I'm sure someone else could chime in on this and have a better or more creative idea on how to do this.. but i think it would give the players a little more sense of accomplishment to see their name and score in gold!

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I'm not able to get this to work. I installed Hitotext in HS dir. I compiled mame as described in BYOAC. I created the hi folder and I am using the mame that the compiler created. Nothing shows up in HS or in the hi folder. Is there something else I'm missing?

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