Chad,(posted 9585 days ago)While you are right that putting some encrypted verification inside every inp would not be fool proof, especially not since MAME's source code is public, it WOULD drastically cut down the number of undetectable cheats. Because without it, everybody could use pause and slowdown cheats, but with a time stamping of some sort in place, only people who know how it works could successfully modify it, which, at least initially (until somebody makes some program available), would mean that only programmers could successfully modify the inp to make it seem valid.
So your idea really isn't that bad. The MAME Dev team probably would not go for it, but just about any programmer could make a special version of MAME, and a site like MARP could require every uploader to use that special version. I guess the best thing would be to make that special version so that it puts the encrypted verification all the way at the end of the recording, because that way, the recording would still play back correctly on the regular version of MAME, and a simple program could be written that would verify if a given inp created by that special version of MAME is valid.
Personally, I am not too worried about cheaters. If someone cheats and beats one of my scores, fine, I have nothing important to gain or lose by having or not having a top score. It's all a game and there are no real prizes won or lost. If somebody really wants to go through the trouble of making sure that recordings are less easy to be rigged, I may even offer some help, but I really don't think it's worth it.
Ben Jos.