MAME Action Replay Page - News

Um... you can download the recordings again now. Sorry about that - I had made a likkle mistake in the script.

Added the number of 1st/2nd/3rd places scores on the leaderboard. Happy now? :o)

Added a chat room. Come and give it a try.

The other thing I was going to do was get the script to send you an email if somebody beat your score. It would be an option, like there would be 5 levels or something:

• mail me whenever a score is uploaded
• only mail me when a 'gold medal' (5 points) score is uploaded
• only mail me when a score is uploaded which reduces my score
• only mail me when a score is uploaded which takes a 'gold medal' score away from me
• never mail me

Would anyone be interested in such a feature?

I'm still messing with the scoring system. It seems that since there's a 'one score per player per game' rule, that making the points for 1st and 2nd place so similar does the guy in first place out of something. If the guy in 2nd wants the points then let him come first! So the current scores on the doors are 10, 3 and 1 for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. Let's see how that goes.

Hi again, gang. Made some far-too-bright arrows for the leaderboard, and my PC crashes if I try to change the colour of them. :o(

This server seems to be going really slowly today. I can barely connect to it, so if you're having problems, you're not alone... I don't expect many people will be able to upload for a while - it seems that some of the other sites on this ISP have also discovered CGI scripting, but haven't quite got the hang of how not to make every other site on the same ISP run at the speed of an acturan mega-donkey in the process... What's funny is that instead of fixing the problem, they have just disabled the 'top' system monitoring problem - "wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous)"

I received an email from people working on the next edition of the Twin Galaxies World Record Book. Apparently they will be looking around this site for scores to include in their book. The only problem, though, is that they are pretty strict about the difficulty settings used on the games. They publish a list of 'Twin Galaxies Settings' (see here). In the past I've always asked contributors to this page to use the default MAME settings when making recordings, but since the Twin Galaxies settings are generally harder than the default MAME settings, please feel free to use them. If you use the Twin Galaxies settings for a recording and wish your score to be included in their book, then please include the word 'TG' in the description field on the upload form. I've added a reminder of this to that form.

Of course, if you would rather play the games on the default settings, then feel free to do that, too. Some people have been getting upset at what they see as people 'cheating', whereas other people have been getting upset at other people taking things too seriously. So - I guess the message is - do what you want! If you want to take it seriously, mark your recordings with 'TG' and ignore all the ones which aren't so marked... You can use the 'edit your recordings' link to go back and put the 'TG' marker in your old recordings if you like.

I hope that keeps everyone happy. How about we move the discussion to the Message Board (see the 'board' link at the top of this page) instead of having all the discussion go through my mail box??!?!!?

I've changed the way the leaderboard scores are awarded. Check THE BOARD for full details. And while you're at it, tell me what you think about the change. :o)

Well - I'm off home for the weekend. It's the Ashton Court festival in Bristol, UK this weekend - Europe's biggest free festival - come on down! :o) Anyway, I've made too many changes this afternoon after drinking too much this lunchtime, so don't be surprised if it all goes horribly wrong as soon as I go home. :o) Have a good one!

A 'MAME Replay' first: today someone (on domain student.soc.unitn.it) has been leeching a copy of the entire site. Does that mean the site has finally made it??? If it makes it easier for you, I can email you the collection of recordings, or make them available as a single download - just email me!

I've extended the CGI script further to include this page and some of the others. You may have been bothered on the way in by a screen whinging at you to change your bookmark. The new change will allow you to log in once and bookmark the resulting page. After that, you shouldn't need to log in again.

When you confirm a score, it won't log it to the 'uploads' page any more. It was getting silly, with the uploads page being full of confirmations are no uploads!

In case you don't know about the 'speedup cheat' in the games I listed yesterday, all you need to do is run MAME with cheats enabled (either like 'mame pacman -cheat' on the command line, or your front end will probably have some way to turn cheats on) and then whenever you press the control key, the appropriate member of the Pacman family will run like the clappers (ie. faster).

More mods to the script. Now it will display the 'optional description' text that you enter when you upload the recording. It will also allow you to edit the text, so if you forgot to say anything when you uploaded the recording, you can go back and put it in. I think it might even allow HTML tags in the description, so things could get a little ugly. But I'll wait and see how it goes. :o)

If you already have a recording which uses the speed-up cheat then you should now be able to edit the recording to use the new name using the 'edit your recording details' on the script menu. Click on the long link on the top line of this screen to get there.

Added new games for the 'speedup cheat' versions of the games which have that cheat. The new names to use are: hangly-fast, jrpacman-fast, mspacatk-fast, mspacman-fast, namcopac-fast, pacman-fast, pacmanjp-fast, pacmod-fast, pacplus-fast, piranha-fast and puckman-fast.

I've been hacking at the CGI script again. The new feature is that you can correct the uploads that you've made, if you enter a game as 'galaga' when you really meant 'galaga-ff' then you might be able to correct it. Oh - except I just remembered I didn't test it yet, so I suppose I'd better not upload it yet, or it will probably trash all the recordings, or something.

Added a search engine for the site. It only searches the static files, not the dynamically updated ones, so it won't find much, I guess. But click HERE to try it out, anyway...

Krool was asking me why he was 2nd in the Boot Hill scores when he had the same score as Dith (they both had 9 points). I told him that since Dith uploaded the score first, he got the point for the leaderboard, but Krool thought that he should a point as well. As it turns out, it doesn't make any difference now, since Krool has since uploaded a score of 11 big points and settled the dispute, but for future reference, what do you reckon is the best way to do it? I reckon there should only be 1 point available per game (other than the ones I've split, like Fax etc.), and it should go to the person who registered the score first in the event of a tie. But what do you think?

Made the adverts bigger. See? I've got too much time on my hands now that you're all using the upload script. :o) If anyone visiting has any good ideas as to how I can increase the number of people submitting scores then please tell me. Especially welcome would be a big shiny flashing link to http://come.to/replay on your web site. Maybe you could graffiti it all over your town, too. Or perhaps that's a bad idea. Yes. I think it is.

In an attempt to draw a few more players to the site, I signed up with the top 25 emulation sites page. If you click on the links saying 'top 25' then I get to be advertised on their site. Or something.

My PC's disk crashed a couple of weeks ago, and since then I've been using a UNIX machine. This means that I'm unable to decode MIME attachments. So if you have emailed me any recordings in the last couple of weeks, I have been unable to upload them. I would suggest using the automatic upload form (click 'submit' above, then 'submit a new recording') if any of your recordings didn't appear on the page yet. Sorry about that. For the 'weird' recordings (like the mysterious exploding invader one), I'll hang on to them until I get MIME email back.

Split the Fax game into 4 games, according to subject. Thanks to JoustGod for the suggestion. Would you like me to split Joust into 128 variants as well? :o)

I've been having a lot of trouble with my email recently. If you've emailed me and I've not got back to you, please email me again, since I've lost track of what's gone out and what's bounced back...

Improved the 'most recent uploads' page a little. Now it's a list which always shows the 50 most recently uploaded files, so it won't ever get too big. The newest ones are listed first, too. It's HERE if you want to see it - or just click 'Uploads' on the top line.

Thanks for your continuing support while I was away - I was very pleased to see that the site continued to be used and uploaded to in my absense - I was worried it might wither and die, you see...

I'm back from holiday in France (like BeeJay says - we was robbed (in the World Cup)). Sorry I didn't manage to tell you that I was going - had some problems connecting to threadnet last Friday. I'm in the process of moving the site to a faster address, but don't have time to do it right now, so keep uploading the recordings. I was planning to disable the upload script until after the move, but have decided not to. I've got a whole mass of emails still to read from people having trouble with the upload script, and I also see that lots of people have got it to work. It should work with netscape version 3 or 4 and M$ internet explorer version 4. If you see a browse button, you should be OK, and if not, you won't be. I'll try to get through the email backlog soon, but can't promise.

There was a problem which stopped people from being able to create new accounts. I think that's fixed now.

Moved the site over to a new place. If you're reading this then you found it, I guess. I hope it's faster. The old 'threadnet' account will be disappearing in a couple of weeks, so please update your bookmark. I think I've got all the recordings moved across to the new place now. Some things are missing - like the batch files, old versions of MAME, and other little things like that. They'll come later.

I'm puzzled. I've been away for over a week and according to the leaderboard display not one of my high scores was beaten while I was away. Is that right? Or did something go wrong. I can't believe that with all those uploaded recordings all my scores stood!

In an attempt to make the site easier to navigate, I've moved all the new bits and some of the old onto a separate page. Click on that big 'Scores/Search/Submit/Leaderboard' link at the top of the page to go there. Sorry about the constant change - I guess Web Design just isn't my Bag, Baby.

Find a list of recent uploads HERE.

I'm off on holiday for a week from today, so I'll not be updating the site. I hope the script continues to work so that you can fight on while I'm away. If you can't get the upload page to work for you, maybe you could 'lend' your password to one of the people who has been able to upload their recordings.

Hey - it looks like the script is finally working OKish! TAB uploaded a bunch of files overnight and is now top - all without me having to lift a finger. Nice one!

Added links to the short name column of the table - the links take you to a display of all the recordings for the game you click. Note - I may have broken the upload log in doing this - I can't run MAME today since my PC's hard disk crashed, so I can't make a recording. I'll have to wait for you, dear visitors, to test it for me. :o)

Added an HHTP 'Expires:' header to the pages generated by the script so that if you do the same query twice within 24 hours you'll (probably) get your browser's cached version of the page. You can still hit 'reload' if you want to get the page fresh from the site.

Arranged for the script to be compiled, so it might run a little faster.

I'm thinking about replacing the A-C page with THIS. What do you say? Is it as good as the old A-C page?

Further improved the upload script. It shouldn't break when new people create accounts and upload now.

Dicked around with the stats script a little more. The aim eventually is that you will be able to upload to the main pages automatically and I will be able to retire, but it's still not quite there yet. You can still SUBMIT recordings automatically, without having to email me, so long as you have a reasonably modern browser. If you don't see the 'Browse' button next to the 'Then Send Recording' button at the bottom of the submit form (after logging in) then your browser is probably still old - you can email me instead... Another aim is that the 'scores' pages will go away, to be replaced by the new 'Search' screen (see the banner at the top) which will allow you to find the scores you want.

I think I might have the script working now. It will try to add your scores directly on to the boards. CLICK HERE and tell me how you get on with it. Apparently it won't work with MSIE3 (but does work with MSIE4 and with Netscape from version 3 and up). Your mileage may vary. Does it?

After further testing I'm less sure that I've got the scripts working, but they work better than when I previously thought they might have been working... It appears that it's almost useful now, but keep trying it. I just noticed one problem: if you make an account with a name like 'ml' (for MonsterLode) which was used before I made the script, (by Mark Longridge) then the script will think get your name wrong - for the time being - and if you're new to this and I don't already know your initials the I guess it might not work at all right now. I'll fix that some time soon, but not tonight.

Sorry about the lack of updates over the last few days. I've been working on a script to allow you the punters to update the page yourselves. I've just about got something working, but it's not complete. It will currently let you upload recordings and will list you on a page, but it won't give you points for the recording just yet. If you want to try it (please do - I want to know if it works for you!), go HERE to create yourself an account. It should be easy enough to use - the 'prefix' name it asks for is the 2 or 3 letter name you put before the recording name, like I put 'zw' for Zwaxy. That's like your login name. Well - try it and let me know what you think, how it could be improved, etc.

I rewrote the leaderboard script in Python (it was in awk before) so now it is easier to manage and extend. It doesn't list the games that a play has the high score for next to their name any more, but you can click on the name to get the list, along with the score for each game. I hope the leaderboard still works alright for you - it is now generated on the fly from the sorted summary page, as opposed to being generated on my PC and uploaded, so it will always be up to date so long as the summary page is. It's also now possible to configure the display to some extent, but to do so you have to mess with the URL. See where it goes "/zwaxy/index.cgi?mode=leaderboard&top=10" in the URL? Change the "&top=10" to "&top=20" to see the top 20, or remove the "&top=10" to see the whole table, even the people with only one score. Also, if you change the "top=10" to "cutoff=3" it will list all the people with more than 3 scores. And so on. Also, these kind of queries do stuff, too:

• .../index.cgi?mode=search&long=194 lists all entries for games with "194" in their long name
• .../index.cgi?mode=search&long=194&score=without lists all entries for games with "194" in their long name which haven't got a high score set
• .../index.cgi?mode=search&short=gal lists all entries for games with "gal" in their short name
• .../index.cgi?mode=search&player=i&short=o&long=M lists all entries for games with an 'o' in their short name and an 'M' in their long name which have a high score set by a player with an 'i' in their name... (!)
• .../index.cgi?mode=search&long=[Jj]oust shows how many of the 4 different versions of Joust are currently owned by JoustGod. :o) (It's 2 out of 4 - not bad!) [ About an hour later... ] Oh - so it's gone up to 4 out of 4 now. Ho hum. :o)

and so on... I think the next thing to be added is some kind of form to allow you to search the database easily, like they have at search engines. This 'type the URL' lark is OK for developing the script, but it gets a bit tedious.

I'm taking a day off from uploading recordings today. I'll process the whole lot of them tomorrow and upload them before the weekend. I hope you can bear this entirely unwarranted delay.

Changed the stats script a bit more. Now there are a couple of forms for selecting the score listing that you want. You can type regular expressions into the text boxes & the script will search for the data. Python's a great language for doing this kind of thing in, I reckon - check it out if you're at all into scripting.

Uploaded another bumper crop of recordings. 49 this time. From the same bunch of regulars. Krool has suggested to me that we ought to declare war on the neighbouring (no!!! come back!!! don't follow that link!!! :o) ) high score page... What does anyone think? You'se up for a fight? Anyway - the recordings. Oh - make it 48. I had to disqualify one of Dith's recordings. I'm pretty lax, but I won't stand for people making up new game names! :o) Yer tiz:

• bbh_bubblesr_121300_m33b5
• bbh_megaforc_411800_m33b5
• bbh_sectionz_114630_m33b5
• bbh_shaolins_1105500_m33b5
• bbh_willow_1291650_m33b6
• bj_galagab2_1044610_mame31
• bj_galap1_36050_mame31
• bj_galapx_39270_mame31
• bj_gallag_531970_mame31
• bj_galmidw_26280_mame31
• bj_galnamco_22250_mame31
• bj_invadpt2_3920_mame31
• bj_invdelux_3660_mame31
• bj_moonal2_15400_m33b5
• di_boothill_7_m33b5
• di_cosmica_3820_m33b5
• di_desterth_6690_m33b5
• di_docastl2_96200_m33b5
• di_dorunrun_426540_m33b5
• di_douni_159660_m33b5
• di_eggs_25610_m33b5
• di_jumpbug_47410_m33b5
• di_jumpjack_28390_m33b5
• di_turpin_13090_m33b5
• jg_amidar_76350_m33b5
• jg_amidars_91210_m33b5
• jg_amigo_66880_m33b5
• jg_berzerk1_5860_m33b6
• jg_btime_162750_m33b5
• jg_bubblesr_98160_m33b5
• jg_bwidow_113675_m33b5
• jg_ccjap_143500_m33b5
• jg_centipd1_61328_m33b1
• jg_centiped_127233_m33b5
• jg_crash_6350_m33b5
• jg_hangly_28960_m33b5
• jg_joust_280200_m33b5
• jg_joustg_293950_m33b5
• jg_puckman_93380_m33b6
• jg_reactor3_87630_m33b5
• jg_superpcn_112940_m33b5
• jg_suprmatk_53365_m33b5
• jr_1941_303500_m33b6
• jr_fax_32953_m33b6
• krl_1941_866800_m33b6
• krl_1941j_626300_m33b6
• krl_karnov_72880_m33b6
• krl_karnovj_76610_m33b6
• krl_nemoj_167200_m33b6

Another player joins the battle over the galaxians scores, Twisted Animator:

twa_galnamco_25440_mame31

• old_liberatr_34170_m33b5
• old_lrunner_85090_m33b5
• old_motorace_103600_m33b5
• old_rollingc_2276_m33b5
• old_rushatck_92920_m33b5

• bj_defender_129650_mame31

• tab_eggs_21740_m33b5
• tab_galap4_16550_m33b5
• tab_galnamco_19850_m33b5

• jr_roadblst_223230_m33b6

• bj_berzerk1_4820_mame31
• bj_cosmica_1640_m33b5
• bj_espiale_118800_mame31
• bj_joust_214250_mame31
• bj_junofrst_135920_m33b5
• bj_spaceatt_3790_mame31
• bj_spaceph_3830_mame31
• bj_sspaceat_59900_mame31
• zeus_amidars_72040_mame31
• zeus_amigo_49720_mame31
• br_boblbobl_3920200_m33b6
• di_astrob_14740_m33b5
• di_cavenger_20760_m33b5
• di_crbaloon_11410_m33b5
• di_docastle_161740_m33b5
• di_jbugsega_40960_m33b5
• di_jumpbug_32090_m33b5
• di_marble_40670_m33b5
• di_srumbler_61600_m33b5
• di_turtles_10460_m33b5
• hb_pengoa_25970_m33b5
• jr_clbowl_300_m33b6
• jr_csprint_10890_m33b5
• jr_ssprint_10070_m33b5
• jsw_gyrussce_518150_m33b5
• jsw_kungfub_290970_m33b5
• jsw_spiders_107870_m33b5
• old_bagman_23490_m33b5
• old_bzone2_24000_m33b5
• old_ckong_49000_m33b5
• old_desterth_6500_m33b5
• old_route16_23240_m33b5
• old_venture_12430_m33b5
• old_willow_7400_m33b5
• tab_docastl2_29480_m33b5
• tab_douni_27160_m33b5
• tab_frogger2_36260_m33b5
• tab_froggers_43450_m33b5
• tab_frogsega_35960_m33b5
• tab_galap1_38740_m33b5
• tab_galapx_32550_m33b5
• tab_galmidw_19390_m33b5
• tab_galturbo_17200_m33b5
• tab_hexa_42584_m33b5
• tab_jhunt_16300_m33b5
• tab_junglek_14600_m33b5
• tab_moonal2b_11740_m33b5
• tab_moonqsr_34020_m33b5
• tab_mpatrol_65200_m33b5
• tab_mpatrolw_65310_m33b5
• tab_mranger_63880_m33b5
• tab_swimmer_11000_m33b5
• tab_swimmera_18120_m33b5

Fixed the 'individual scores' script so the games appear in alphabetical order. Didn't get time to upload the latest flood of new recordings, but will do before the day is out. BJ's got all his Galaxian scores back, SportsDude has become AtariDude and Dith has been very busy...