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I've now verified that depending on the hiscore in the hiscore.dat file for any gunbird recording (gunbird,gunbirdj, gunbirdk) depends on the seed used for recording/playingback inps correctly. Currently there are a bunch of recordings that can playback with either a missing hiscore.dat but there are many that don't playback with a hiscore.dat i got from someone a while back.

2 possible options, the first (A) is by far the most confirming with the current nvram policy. It ensures that you can't make a recoring that will never playback if you forget to copy hiscore.dat before recording (since if you have mame setup to modify hiscore.dat when a hi score is made, a new hi would overwrite the previous score in the file that would only make it playback.) The second (B) is possible but would require a script to copy the hiscore.dat before recording and make zip files large submited to marp and it would reqiure uploaders to specify weather or not they had a hiscore.dat file preexisting. On the plus side it would allow the use of the hiscore.dat file for keeping hiscores saved. (C) seems pretty lame but i can't think of an alternative to A or B.

Question: Doesn't having an entry in hiscore.dat make a .hi file, so you would eliminate the .hi file, not hiscore.dat - or was that in early MAME times?

Just curious - either way I'd vote aye if it makes a difference in playbackability.

i'm pretty sure hi files were replaced by the hiscore.dat file at some point, i.e. if you look at your hi directory nothing appears to have been created for any recent mame games i've played. thus if you went back to a mame where hi files were used you would need to remove the hi file too. But the first version of gunbird came out around m37b10 which was the time hiscore.dat was still used and not hi files.

hiscore.dat tells MAME what to put in .hi files. Also, .hi files are ignored for recording and playback as it is.

All I can figure is that MAME puts in values that are different from the default in the RAM area where the high scores are stored.

I can't speak for the game in question, but I know there are a bunch of games where bonuses depend on whether or not you've beaten a best time or score for that section of the games.

I believe that if the game requires a .hi to playback, as well as a .nvr, then it should not be allowed.

Using NVRAM alone isn't allowed in the first place...

scores are now reflecting hiscore.dat removal prior to recording. Interesting enough the gunbirdk and gunbirdj recordings don't care about the hiscore.dat file existing. the reason behind this is that the hiscore.dat that is floating around only has a hiscore entry for the gunbird clone, the j and k clone entries are non existant. But i'm assuming if you have a hiscore entry for the clones, the same hiscore.dat will be required to play the recording back, thus always remove hiscore.dat before recording.

thanks.

Could very well be a difference between versions, remembering that the set that is now the parent wasn't a version or two back.