Chris,

Here's a project for you instead of writing another driver for Mame how about adjusting the record option so that if the average FPS is not at least say 90% (actually I personally think 95% would be better) for more than say 5 seconds then Mame kills the machine/recording with a message stating that "you're not recording close enough to original machine speed so this recording is not valid" or something along those lines.

This would remove the possibility of people using sub-standard recording speeds for their inp files. Well ok, so maybe someone desperate to get to the top could remove this code and recompile the source etc but if they want to go to those extremes they won't feel the same satisfaction as us legit players do when we crack a new PB or a new 1st place score. :-)

Are you feeling up to the task ?! If not, perhaps you could post a suggestion along these lines to the Mame developers list-server ?!

Cheers, BeeJay.

-- BeeJay (bjohnstone@cardinal.co.nz), November 08, 1998

Answers

How about notification on playback instead?

I imagine there are people who record games for their own enjoyment and never submit an .inp file to MARP. I see no reason to penalize them for having a slow machine. ;-)

Instead, how about encoding this information during the recording and then being able to view the information on playback? Something as simple as an average FPS when the .inp file ends would be sufficient.

Another interesting thing to see would be when the player paused the game and for what duration. There are many puzzle games where hitting pause could siginificantly raise your score. :-)

To be honest though, I'm not all that worried about cheating on the MARP. I figure that most of the good players here wouldn't cheat. Where is the fun in saying you are number #1 and knowing you had to cheat on 250 different games to do it? If you are gonna cheat, why not do it right and build an .inp generator/editor which lets you tweak away for perfect play. :-)

-Thunky

-- Thunky (halsema@gte.net), November 10, 1998.