Feature idea - Party Mode high score keeper for games played through LB and/or BB

[Todd Bachmann]

Hello, I have Launchbox and Big box running my Arcade Cabinet. This cabinet has been a fun feature for parties where we choose one game and people take turns playing it. We keep track of their high scores to see how it compares to others at the party. An example is Ms. PacMan. The Arcade Cabinet stays on that game for the entire party and people play to vie for the top score and rank themselves agains other party goers. It would be awesome if you folks could create/design a party scoring mode where LB or BB keeps track of the scores of the game that’s running independent from Mame and your community leader board where people could enter in their name after they finish the game to attach to that score. I know MS. Pac Man keeps the top 10 high scores but an example is many of those Ms. Pacman high scores saved on my machine were still higher that what kids at the party could score. We had to fill it out by hand on notebook paper. A virtual version of that would be great.

[Jim]

I agree that this would be a cool feature to have (I also have BB running in an arcade cabinet), but I don't think it's technically possible for LB/BB to do this, at least not completely.

My understanding is that LB/BB is only aware of a high score if MAME writes out a new high score to the games high score file. MAME only writes a new high score to the file if a new high score is set in the game. I.e. the first hurdle to clear is getting a score high enough for the arcade game itself to record it in its high score file.

If the game high score file is written while the game is running (not just on exit) then (based on my very limited understanding how this works) the best LB/BB could do is something like this:

• Launch a game in "party score" mode
• Temporarily rename the game's high score file to "game.party" (from game.hi)
• Whenever a high score is written to game.hi also save it in a LB/BB "party score" DB
• Anytime a new high score is written to game.hi copy it to the LB/BB "party score" DB
• Next (the step that probably kills this idea is) you'd need a way to periodically delete game.hi and restart the game so it starts with an empty high score table (so new high scores could once again be saved to game.hi and stored in the LB/BB party score DB)
• Lastly you'd have to remember to exit party score mode for the game when your party is done

In the example above replace "game.hi" with the real game's high score file name (like "dkong.hi” for Donkey Kong as an example).

After writing all this out it seems like this idea is probably impractical to implement, but I'd love for the LB/BB army of devs (both of them :) to prove me wrong.

Today, the best you could do before a party is to delete (or rename if you want to restore your old high scores after the party's over) the party game's "game.hi" file so that the only high scores shown are from your party.