Maybe I should have started a new thread for this one, because it doesn't really belong in the current thread, except that it is a response to a few lines by Crash. It's regarding the high scores not being saved when recording (or playing back!) an .inp:(posted 9537 days ago)I wouldn't like them to be saved when playing back an .inp of course, because every .inp I'd watch would do this then, which includes .inps created by others, and which also includes multiple entries with the same score when watching the .inp more than once.
As far as I understand, the main problem is that some games use the scores currently in the high score table as a seed for their random number generator, which means that, for those games, recordings would only play back correctly if you have a copy of the high score file of the person who recorded it (and right BEFORE he recorded it, not after!). That is why the high score file cannot be loaded when recording and playing back.
Anyway, to get to Crash's line: I didn't like it very much either that my best scores are only available in .inps and not in the high score tables on my hard drive. So I wrote a little program that I can use to insert scores into my .hi files. It probably is not of much use to anyone but me since it only supports (some of) the few games I play. I think at this moment it supports 35 games or so, which sounds a lot more than it actually is since this includes clones. It would be a LOT of work to have it support all games in MAME that save high scores, since just about every game has its own format, so every .hi file has to be analysed separately. I guess the only thing that was useful to others as well that resulted from this is that I found some .hi files in which there was something wrong, and so I pointed this out to the MAMEdev team, including a full explanation exactly what and why it was wrong, and including a few replacement lines of source code to fix it. Those fixes have been (silently) applied to MAME now, so I am glad I was able to make some tiny contributions to MAME.
Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that if you really want your high score to be in your .hi file, it isn't that hard to analyse the .hi file usually, and put it there manually. OK, so you can cheat this way. Big deal. It's not like we're submitting .hi files, and since we are no longer submitting screenshots (or at least not just by themselves), a screenshot of such an edited high score table is pretty useless too as a cheat. Besides, it's probably just as easy to use some image editor to change things on a screenshot.
FWIW, Ben Jos.