Games and highscores

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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oRBIT2002
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Games and highscores

Post by oRBIT2002 »

I guess 99% of all games doesn't have batterybackup and doesn't save their highscores. Anyone else but me that's disturbed by this? :-)

I was thinking if there's a way of implementing this in a clever way in "our" emulators instead of hacking the game to use battery-RAM?
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James
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Post by James »

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oRBIT2002
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Post by oRBIT2002 »

Interesting, but some kind of "standard" would be cool.
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MottZilla
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Post by MottZilla »

Make a simple to read file format that would describe for each game what memory to save and restore to maintain high scores. You might need to not just have the memory location but also a timing point (maybe an executed address) to trigger loading the saved data since games will initialize the high score at some unknown point otherwise.

But no high score saving never bothered me.
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rainwarrior
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Post by rainwarrior »

You can savestate before quitting. Some emulators might be willing to auto save/load state per-ROM whenever you quit or re-open.

The UberNES leaderboard thing is pretty cool though.
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

There is not only the hi-scores, but many games also features you to enter a 3-letter name and they keep the top-5 in memeory.

I always found this completely pointless for a console game, but their goal was to make it feel like arcade games as much as possible, and in this regard it worked amazingly well.
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oRBIT2002
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Post by oRBIT2002 »

Excitebike also comes to mind, the leveldesigner neved saved the userdesigned track..
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rainwarrior
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Post by rainwarrior »

The Famicom version of Excitebike had a device you could get to save levels to tape, I believe. (It seems the Family BASIC keyboard had a cassette tape interface.)
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oRBIT2002
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Post by oRBIT2002 »

Just did a patch for "Mario Bros Classic" if anyone's interested. :)
Highscore is now saved using battery RAM.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2590713/Nintend ... D-v1.2.zip

EDIT: This was annoying. It doesn't work with PowerPak for some reason. Does PowerPak has any limitations with mapper0 games and battery RAM? It looks like the battery RAM doesn't get modified as it should.

EDIT2: Just confirmed this. Mapper 0 and SRAM obviously doesn't work with PowerPak. :-(

EDIT3: Updated the mapper to MMC1. Now works on PowerPak.
Last edited by oRBIT2002 on Thu May 24, 2012 12:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

I think you need to hack it to be MMC1.
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oRBIT2002
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Post by oRBIT2002 »

Are there any hardware limitations preventing battery RAM to work with mapper 0 carts?

EDIT: Hacking it to MMC1 did the trick. Thanks.
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Post by tepples »

oRBIT2002 wrote:Are there any hardware limitations preventing battery RAM to work with mapper 0 carts?
The only licensed mapper 0 cart with battery RAM is Family BASIC, and that's a Famicom exclusive. PowerPak is an NES exclusive.
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

Since when is the PowerPak restricted to officially licenced games, let alone games released in the Western areas ?
Does it block TNROM for this reason ?

Of course not, the PowerPak is a development tool and should support as much configurations as possible. If it doesn't support NROM + Battery backed SRAM then it's definitely a bug.
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

Nestopia also doesn't allow WRAM for mapper #0. This doesn't indicate a bug, it indicates an intentional design decision. I don't like the decision. I think the NES 2.0 header should indicate if there is no WRAM.
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never-obsolete
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Post by never-obsolete »

I hacked Galaga and Tetris to save the highscores. I could post patches when I get home if anyone is interested.
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