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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Interest in a tricks.dat?
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