MAME .172 (MESS) snes and others not saving - nvram issue?

[scoodidabop]

So I'm still on Hyperlaunch (haven't changed over to Rocketlauncher yet) and in moving from MESS 158 to MAME 172 for SNES and other home consoles I notice there's no save files working.  IE in Super Mario when you select your game save at the title screen everything comes up "empty".  

 

My only thought is that maybe the MESS module is sending some incompatible command to MAME?  There's apparently a bug in .172 that disables console saves if using fullpath vs. software list, which probably isn't helping.  Anyway let me know if you think there might be a solution here.

 

Thanks!

[gigapig]

I have no idea if this is the same for systems other than arcade games but the Hi score part of Mame changed recently. It now has to be switched on in the ini file (see example below), this works for the likes of Galaga but you can try it for other systems and see if it works.

 

# CORE MISC OPTIONS

#

drc                       1

drc_use_c                 0

drc_log_uml               0

drc_log_native            0

bios                      

cheat                     0

skip_gameinfo             0

uifont                    default

ui                        cabinet

ramsize                   

confirm_quit              0

ui_mouse                  1

autoboot_command          

autoboot_delay            0

autoboot_script           

console                   0

plugins                   1

plugin                    hiscore

noplugin                  

language                  English

 

[scoodidabop]

Thanks for the tip Giga.  So when I start a SNES game, choose a game save slot and begin the game, then hit F3 to restart the game with MAME still open it looks like the nvram works!  The save stays!  But when I quit out MAME completely and start over the nvram doesn't load and the game save is gone.  Could be the .172 bug that hazemame talked about.

 

One other thing I'm just learning about is the new MESS software list thing that came around last year.  I grabbed the .172 software list stuff for snes but none of the 7z files match the standard XML.  I was hoping that adding the software list 7z files would fix the issue of the new cheats not showing up but I can't seem to figure out how to load the MESS hash xml or software list 7z files into MAME.  Tricky stuff indeed.  Ultimately I don't 'need' the cheats but they'd be fun to have.