Duplicate Games (clones, prototypes, bootlegs) for Multiple High Scores

[D. Eric Franks]

First: I LOVE the High Score Leaderboard for MAME. I have obsessively been climbing the ranks and am at 3rd now (def.red), mostly because there aren’t a ton of us competing. That said, I could see this catching on and becoming THE must-have feature of Launchbox premium and worth $30 all by itself. If it did become extremely popular (I’ve been promoting the heck out of it), it would need to limit which ROMs for a game can contribute a High Score to one. As it is, you can game the system by selecting a weird variation/bootleg/prototype version of a game no one else is playing and get a #1 rank because no one else is playing that ROM, even if you are objectively terrible at that game and the primary version has a very competitive leaderboard. Just rough numbers, but there are about 700 unique games that have high score support, but there are something like 12,000 variations.

This is likely a database issue that would require manually going in and selecting the single “official” version of the game, which wouldn’t be without controversy, but I’d be willing to dive in and do the grunt work. Another possibility would be to limit the set of ROMs to only Games Playable in MAME, no clones as separate games, no bootlegs, no prototypes - this also won’t be without controversy and someone will complain, but then again, someone always does anyhow.

Not a big deal today and is literally only affecting four people at the top of the All Time Leaderboard, but hopefully it’ll become a big deal soon! Thanks again!

[Retro808]

You are not really gaming the system since each game that supports high scores has its own leader board listing. So even though you are playing one of those offshoots it is not like the high score you get on one of those variants will affect the high scores in the official roms. Sure it adds to your overall leader board ranking, but it is not like someone used cheats or made dip switch changes to game the system (which thankfully using either will prevent a high score from logging). So if more people played those variations/bootlegs/prototypes as well it would then eat into the overall high score standings and change the leader board.

[Jason Carr]

Hi Eric, the issue with this is that different versions of the ROM sometimes have completely different mechanics. You can’t put all versions of a ROM onto the same leaderboard, because some of them play and behave differently. So combining them definitely wouldn’t be a good idea.