MiSTer FPGA Forum

Is there anyway to preserve arcade core high scores aside from leaving MiSTer running ?

Pen and paper or phone snaps are your friends!
No other way but to leave the machines running, like you would have had to do in a café or arcade.

It would be nice to implement sone of the hardware based high score save kits out there (I.e., highscoresaves.com)

We can add high scores using the mame hiscore database. Maybe I will take a pass at it soon.

alanswx wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:25 pm We can add high scores using the mame hiscore database. Maybe I will take a pass at it soon.

That would be really great.

that would be awesome

Preserving Scores would be the absolute icing on the cake.. Wow, just excited to see it is on the radar..

Yes! That would be awesome!

alanswx wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:25 pm We can add high scores using the mame hiscore database. Maybe I will take a pass at it soon.

Does the linux/arm side actually have access to the FPGA memory? Or is this going to involve having to modify the sys module to provide an interface for generic peeks into FPGA memory?

zakk4223 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 9:42 pm

alanswx wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:25 pm We can add high scores using the mame hiscore database. Maybe I will take a pass at it soon.

Does the linux/arm side actually have access to the FPGA memory? Or is this going to involve having to modify the sys module to provide an interface for generic peeks into FPGA memory?

Most arcade cores store the "memory" for the arcade system on the FPGA in bram. So we will have to setup some code to be able to read/write to that main ram like mame does. It should be straightforward hopefully.. We might need dual port ram, i need to look at it. I think if we build it for one arcade game, it should be fairly straightforward to port to the next. Some cores like pacman will effect many games at once.

i was wondering about this as well.

it would be awesome to have high scores saved for MiSTer

Why can’t high score saving be done in-game? BitKit does it. I mean I know it requires some work per-core, but it still seems worth it.


—Donnie

You could grab a screenshot with WIN + PrtSc when you get a high score. Then move that screengrab into your wallpapers folder

It might be worth looking at the Defender Core - that hardware family had a battery backup (3 AA/LR6 Batteries) to save several daily/all-time high scores, so it would stand to reason there is not just a logical, but also physical, location for that information, and could springboard linking the ARM side to similar spots in other boards.

I could, of course, be very wrong; I'm still learning how this all works.

mhartman wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2020 8:22 pm It would be nice to implement sone of the hardware based high score save kits out there (I.e., highscoresaves.com)

This seems like the best solution. There are high score kits available for most of these popular arcade platforms. But I say best coming from someone who has no idea what this would entail for core modifications.

Easiest solution would probably be to port the saveram feature of other cores and adapt it to the areas where the high scores are saved in the Arcade board's ram temporarily.

aberu wrote: ↑Thu Oct 15, 2020 6:24 pm Easiest solution would probably be to port the saveram feature of other cores and adapt it to the areas where the high scores are saved in the Arcade board's ram temporarily.

The list of ram locations are in the mame hiscores.dat file. We should put this table into the MRA and build a generic module to read the ram locations from the mra and use it to load / save ram.

I haven’t gotten around to building this yet. But happy to help someone else do it.

So with the latest update to the arcade cores and mentions of nvram, does that mean high scores will now be stored?

I know that Alan was looking into this as part of his process going through the arcades to update the framework; I'm not sure how many will have the required information easily obtainable though.

I'm pretty sure that for those which do get this update, he will include a comment in the notification post.

Aspie wrote: ↑Sat Jan 09, 2021 3:20 pm So with the latest update to the arcade cores and mentions of nvram, does that mean high scores will now be stored?

That was likely there to support arcade systems that save settings to some sort of permanent storage, like cps1.5 (and cps2), cave etc.

I guess a core could leverage that to save high scores, but it would still require more per-core work. (and may not even be the best way to approach the problem, given some cores can load multiple games, or variants of the same game)

The latest updates by alanswx to defender cores have definitely added high score load+save - or more accurately load+save of the whole CMOS RAM. (I was having a go at trying to implement it myself but as soon as i saw the update to main a little while back i stepped back as i knew someone else more competent was working on it!)

It only saves that at the moment when you use the Save Settings menu option though, so I'm still hoping to get autosave working somehow.

Thanks Jimmy that's great news. Defender was one game that I had hoped would implement high score saves.

I tried the Defender update last night and it's fantastic. Not just because of the high score saves, but the new control mode options, especially mode 2. I used to have to remap the controls every time I loaded Defender to get this set up. Now it's there automatically.

For anyone who is interested, I've started applying alanswx's changes enable NVRAM save/load to other cores - so far I've updated the MCR3 and MCR3Scroll cores (I'm basically doing this in order of games I like so Spy Hunter came first!). That adds support to:

MCR3Scroll
- Spy Hunter
- Crater Raider
- Turbo Tag

MCR3
- Discs of Tron
- Journey
- Tapper
- Timber

As with Defender you need to hit Save Settings in the core menu to save those scores

I'll be honest I'm very new to MiSTer development so I'm not going to promise anything yet

I do think we could implement the optional autosave behaviour similar to some console cores where save is triggered by opening the OSD - and that would keep me happy at least!

Great work Jimmy. I downloaded your updates today and had a few games of Tapper.

Good evening... Some more high score save enabled cores and games:

MCR3-Mono
- Demolition Derby
- Max RPM
- Power Drive
- Rampage
- Sarge
- Star Guards
MCR2
- Domino Man
- Kozmik Kroozr
- Satans Hollow
- Tron
- Two Tigers
- Wacko
MCR1
- Kick / Kick Man
- Solar Fox
Berserk
Frenzy

Fantastic! I somehow missed that this was already being worked on. Manual saving is a great first way to save highscores without risk of corruption when turning the MiSTer off. Another idea I mentioned elsewhere could be to save when exiting a core.

I added high score save / restore for :
Azurian,
Black Hole,
Devil Fish,
Galaxian,
King and Balloon,
Moon Cresta,
Orbitron,
Picses,
Uniwar S,

Another chunk of titles now with high score save/load:

Amidar
Anteater
Armored Car
Battle of Atlantis
Calipso
Dark Planet
Frogger
Lost Tomb
Minefield
Moonwar
Rescue
Scramble
Super Cobra
Tazz-Mania
The End
Turtles