| casm |
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Interest in a tricks.dat?
#276058 - 02/15/12 02:02 AM
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Just floating the idea for right now to see what people think. I'm not even really sure of the practicalities of integrating it into MAME, though in at least a basic form it shouldn't be much of a problem.
The idea would basically be to have a tricks.dat file that contains a list of easter eggs, hidden bonuses, beneficial and detrimental glitches, etc., that could be pulled up during a game. It would be complementary to cheat.dat, and focussed on non-obvious things that can be achieved in-game without having to actually patch or otherwise alter the game.
At its most basic it would just be a pop-up that the player could activate to display the text of available tricks for the running game on the screen. However, it could conceivably also be possible down the road to tie it in to the debugger / cheat system and have it do cleverer things - like check a particular location in game memory for a certain value (e.g., a level number) and pop up a dismissible reminder of an easter egg or trick that can be used on that particular level. Something like MAME pauses when it first reads that value, displays the reminder, the user reads and dismisses it, and the game resumes. This behaviour could be determined with a commandline option.
Obviously a structure for the tricks.dat file would need to be chosen and the information consolidated into it, which would be no small task. However, it could be compiled over time; it's not like this is a showstopper feature.
Like I say, I'm just floating the idea, and think it could make a good complement to the existing cheat system. FWIW, this got sparked off by the news that a box of hard disks I thought I'd lost years ago was found, and one of those disks may still have a complete wget of RCATT on it; I know that I did one c.2007 or so, and there was information on that site I haven't seen repeated elsewhere (except for in scattered textfiles from which some of it was derived). It just seems like it could be a way to make the games themselves more fun while also consolidating an aspect of their documentation into a central reference work.
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| Tomu Breidah |
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No Problems, Only Solutions
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Re: Interest in a tricks.dat?
[Re: casm]
#276069 - 02/15/12 02:52 AM
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> Just floating the idea for right now to see what people think. I'm not even really
> sure of the practicalities of integrating it into MAME, though in at least a basic
> form it shouldn't be much of a problem.
>
Quite a few years back there was some mention of a moves.dat. The idea behind it was that it would list moves for mainly fighting games. It was already being used in another version or front-end for MAME... but it was an illegal build or something like that. Also, it was considered that it would just take up extra space (cause bloat) and wouldn't really be beneficial. 
Although, if there were a database - users could add only the info/data for the games they needed without having a ton of other useless 'tricks/moves' for the games they didn't have.
Er, anyway. I doubt anything like that would happen. At least in the official MAME build.
eta: iirc, S.P. -when he would submit cheats - I think he would include 'tricks' in the bottom/comment part of cheats for games. But I haven't used cheats in MAME for a long time.
Edited by T0M (02/15/12 02:57 AM)
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LEVEL-4
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| casm |
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Cinematronics > *
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Re: Interest in a tricks.dat?
[Re: Tomu Breidah]
#276074 - 02/15/12 03:27 AM
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> > Just floating the idea for right now to see what people think. I'm not even really
> > sure of the practicalities of integrating it into MAME, though in at least a basic
> > form it shouldn't be much of a problem.
> >
>
> Quite a few years back there was some mention of a moves.dat. The idea behind it was
> that it would list moves for mainly fighting games.
I think I vaguely remember that now. My recollection is that I didn't really pay much attention to it at the time since I tend to not play fighting games, so it didn't have a whole lot of appeal.
> It was already being used in
> another version or front-end for MAME... but it was an illegal build or something
> like that. Also, it was considered that it would just take up extra space (cause
> bloat) and wouldn't really be beneficial.
True, but as an optional download (similar to cheat.dat), it wouldn't be adding much to the core. More:
> Although, if there were a database - users could add only the info/data for the games
> they needed without having a ton of other useless 'tricks/moves' for the games they
> didn't have.
Which is kind of how I was thinking of it working - have one tricks.dat that contains a file for each game with known tricks. This way you can have either the whole lot or just specific ones that you're interested in. Some PHP onto a MySQL backend at the download site could make it pointy-clicky enough that you could build the tricks.dat to suit rather than having to go through and manually remove the ones you don't want each time there's an update.
> Er, anyway. I doubt anything like that would happen. At least in the official MAME
> build.
Possibly, but I figure it's worth at least kicking around the idea; this is a side of the games that's somewhat spottily-documented, and this may be a good way to improve that situation. Maybe not. But it's at least food for thought.
> eta: iirc, S.P. -when he would submit cheats - I think he would include 'tricks' in
> the bottom/comment part of cheats for games. But I haven't used cheats in MAME for a
> long time.
Yeah, I also kind of remember that. Then again, cheats are something I haven't used in quite a while either.
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Re: Interest in a tricks.dat?
[Re: Tomu Breidah]
#276084 - 02/15/12 05:43 AM
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Are you talking about the command.dat file?
> > Just floating the idea for right now to see what people think. I'm not even really
> > sure of the practicalities of integrating it into MAME, though in at least a basic
> > form it shouldn't be much of a problem.
> >
>
> Quite a few years back there was some mention of a moves.dat. The idea behind it was
> that it would list moves for mainly fighting games. It was already being used in
> another version or front-end for MAME... but it was an illegal build or something
> like that. Also, it was considered that it would just take up extra space (cause
> bloat) and wouldn't really be beneficial.
>
> Although, if there were a database - users could add only the info/data for the games
> they needed without having a ton of other useless 'tricks/moves' for the games they
> didn't have.
>
> Er, anyway. I doubt anything like that would happen. At least in the official MAME
> build.
>
>
> eta: iirc, S.P. -when he would submit cheats - I think he would include 'tricks' in
> the bottom/comment part of cheats for games. But I haven't used cheats in MAME for a
> long time.
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Re: Interest in a tricks.dat?
[Re: casm]
#276096 - 02/15/12 06:30 AM
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| Tomu Breidah |
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No Problems, Only Solutions
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Re: Interest in a tricks.dat?
[Re: uVSthem]
#276100 - 02/15/12 07:36 AM
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Re: Interest in a tricks.dat?
[Re: OldSchoolGamer]
#276113 - 02/15/12 01:13 PM
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> It already exists for MAMEUI Plus and MAMEUIFX. It's called command.dat. Here is the
> link:
>
> http://home.comcast.net/~plotor/
well, to my knowledge command.dat mostly displays combo moves for fighting games, which is not what was proposed here
but it's been at least since 2005 that I don't really check it, so they might have added something like the OP proposed lately...
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Re: Interest in a tricks.dat?
[Re: casm]
#276134 - 02/15/12 07:18 PM
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Good idea - although history.dat contains some of this information - so it may be best to add to history.dat to save needing to create yet another .dat file to support.
Kranser.
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| casm |
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Re: Interest in a tricks.dat?
[Re: OldSchoolGamer]
#276146 - 02/15/12 08:39 PM
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> It already exists for MAMEUI Plus and MAMEUIFX. It's called command.dat. Here is the
> link:
>
> http://home.comcast.net/~plotor/
Yes and no. There are a couple of issues with this:
1) As far as I can tell, that hasn't been updated since 2007. That doesn't necessarily mean that the information it contains is bad, but rather that it needs five years of updates just to catch up with where MAME is now - and there's already a lot of unincluded information to add in on top of it.
2) It appears to be geared heavily towards giving moves for fighting games. That's within the scope of what I'm proposing, but doesn't go quite far enough. I think this was mentioned in one of my earlier replies, FWIW.
3) This is intended for use with MAME32+. That's not a MAME build that runs on a platform that I use, and I'm not likely to fire up a Windows VM for MAME. What I'm proposing is something that would be part of the stock source tree.
Edited by casm (02/15/12 08:46 PM)
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| casm |
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Cinematronics > *
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Re: Interest in a tricks.dat?
[Re: Kranser]
#276147 - 02/15/12 08:41 PM
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> Good idea - although history.dat contains some of this information - so it may be
> best to add to history.dat to save needing to create yet another .dat file to
> support.
Funnily enough, this was kind of an offshoot thought that I'd had - add the info to history.dat, but use a special mark/demark sequence in history.dat to delineate a trick vs. something that would be considered game history. I can see benefits and disadvantages both ways, but it seems relatively workable at least on the face of it.
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MAME used to show the history info in-game....
[Re: casm]
#276161 - 02/15/12 11:37 PM
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but that functionality was taken out.
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Consider it high comedy....sincere tragedy....whatever...don't take it personally.
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