[Release] Compo4all MAME - ladder/scoreboard competition for classic arcade games :)


skeezix

Internal Development
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No longer beta.. this is a good stable release these days .. check it out!

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=compo4all-skeezix-0001

Fancier web frontend is now up (thanks milkshake!):

http://c4a.openpandora.org/

(more features to come!)

Compo4All (or "C4A") is a MAME pnd (equivilent more or less to PanMAME's 0.106 AdvMAME build) with bunch of stuff added so we can compete head to head in scoreboard ladders.; not multiplayer action, but high score competition.

Now with indie non-MAME titles, and soon to ben other emulators as well (SNES anyone?)

We have a basic wiki page up and slowly filling in: http://pandorawiki.org/Compo4All

A list of all current scoreboards in one place (this is the fugly old site, which still works): http://skeezix.wallednetworks.com:13001/links_1

Supported so far .. Ms Pacman, Galaxian, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Flying Shark, Mr. Do! .. more coming all the time. Actual compo, not sure which we'll do yet :)

Added Pulstar (shmup) and Bubble Bobble (platform) and Rygar.. always more popping up

So far I've added classic oldie games, to help test and prove the system works:

- damned near everyone has legal access to Ms Pacman and the others (didn't everyone at some point or another buy a Namco collection for xbox, PSP, whatever? If not, hit up your bargain bin and pick one up .. a $5 way to get licenses for a few dozen classic games!)

- I didn't enable yet, but I can have it email you when your scores get beaten; could make it interesting .. or annoying :) If this get really hot (doubt it, but you can dream right?) .. get an SMS "buddy, you need to crack down on your Street Fighter 2 since EvilDragon just pounded your score"

- I roped Prometheus in as a player, I think ;) muahuahua. Just you wait, if I get a Megaman title in here ;)

When you run C4A, it essentially is syncing your high-scores to a server; everyone is competing against the same high scores. It is currently set to reset monthly.  As of now, you get a brief view of the top scorers in the C4A launcher itself, or you can visit the links above to get the long versions. We're working on a fancier website. Possibly in the future we could integrate a view into the emu itself, an overlay to show running action.. but thats way down the road.

Example:

  Initial Name Score When

1 SKZ SkeezixPandora 1140 21-Feb-2013

2 SKZ SkeezixPandora 270 21-Feb-2013

3 SKZ SkeezixPandora 270 21-Feb-2013

Competition and additional games ..

- One avenue I'm gearing up for is a _Friendly Competition_.. maybe even a monthly or bimonthly one. I've even got some really neato prizes lined up, if we go for it.

- The plan is to have a couple of games per month or per 'season' (which could be days, weeks, months long)

- Maybe add a 'overall' scoreboard as well per game, so that you can play the current 'season' of games, but also play games from past seasons and fight the full long term scoreboard

- Maybe we do some polls to figure out which games to target next or each season or for adding to 'all games' mode....

A security note (which is also in the game banner on launch): this requires your pandora to be connected to the net, since it syncs scores in semi-realtime. It doesn't look outside of its own game directory or do any nefarious business, but I like to be up front here. Also, it wont' work if you're not connected to the net somehow (wifi, whatever.) It'll tell you cleanly though, not just crash :)

When first run, you have to create a profile; the launcher tool lets you create, delete or edit your profile. A profile essentially lets you specify a cross-game set of initials and 'long name'; ie: "SKZ" I picked for myself. It does not enforce uniqueness (the original arcade games don't either of course), so try to use a sensible initial set (EvD) and for your long name.. use your board-name here (EvilDragon, say.) Nice and easy. This way when you get a high score in a game, it registers your profile against it on the server for all to see (the initials you put into a game do not matter.) The launcher won't let you run a C4A game until your profile is set up, but it takes all of 10 seconds to do.

- try not to lose your appdata (or your c4a-prof file, anyway); I can try to build a recovery tool, but have not; anyway, your profile is unique.. if you delete it and make a new one, you can try to impersonate yourself which is fine, but it does make it harder to group your scores say.. to get a list of all your achievements, etc.

A note on the emu..

- this is MAME 0.106 (very close to PanMAME since it is derived from that; mcobit's instructionsd and such all apply; just copy over your mspacman.zip rom and you're good to go)

- savestates are disabled (too easy)

- first run of the pnd creates the appdata etc (it tells you onscreen), drop in the rom, and run again and you're off to the races

A note on cheating..

- it is very hard to prevent cheating in a situation like this; on the order of.. one could easily spend 50-times the amount of effort on securing it than getting the actual code working, and I'd rather not do that :)   I also don't want to force recording of the play joystick moves or videos .. if we have to go that far, its not worth doing :(

- impersonating other people ... lame

- using alternate emu builds .. lame

- hexediting the ROMs, the emu, score-RAM, etc ... lame

- feeding bogus data into my server .. lame (but I can provide an alternate port if you wish to try, and then let me know what you break. thats okay.)

- lets just be sportsmanlike, ok? :)

Ahright folks.. gauntlet is down... for beta and Ms Pacman, anyway :)

Whose in?

There, I told you our old ROT ("Retro Offline Tournament") could be back; now its what.. "ROOT"? Retro Online/Offline Tournament? :)

jeff

Coders.. you can now add indie-games or ports to the onlin scoreboards! For basic 'score only' games, see this post:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php/topic/12127-release-compo4all-mame-ladderscoreboard-competition-for-classic-arcade-games/page-18#entry237182

A dev wiki page is up too: http://pandorawiki.org/Compo4AllSDK

For additional game types, I'll add more details..
 
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Very cool ,I'm going to have to give this a try now . I always welcome another MAME build .
Thanks for your time ..Bud

Edit - Yay I made the leader board  lol ( for now anyways !! )
 
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Ooops, apparently I suck at sorting; will worry about it tomorrow :eek:

1 BUD Budweiser 12830 21-Feb-2013

2 SKZ SkeezixPandora 380 21-Feb-2013

3 SKZ SkeezixPandora 1140 21-Feb-2013

Thats what happens when whole family has the stomach flu for a week and you're sleeping less than the usual 4 hours a night :eek:
 
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Seriously this is very cool :)   hope to see it progress into more games maybe 5-10 games per month to choose from ,

that way there is bound to be one or more games your found of ( but stick with the classic titles ).

Keep up the good work .I'm very excited to see this friendly community gaming battle on my Pandora... Bud
 
Will try it today. Promised ;)
Wouldn't it be good, if you sync the profiles with the server? Would make recovering much easier.
 
Oh thats pretty cool. I hope to get some time taking part on the next Compo :)
 
Just tried it and like it :)

Suggestion for the frontend:

Set the nubmodes to joystick when launching the game via the frontend and set them back to mouse when quitting advmame.

This way, you can navigate the frontend with the nubs.

Maybe I am a bit sensitive to this, but my touchscreen is broken ;)

edit: typo: ...support out friends... -> ...support our friends...

Also, the dragonbox link can go to www.dragonbox.de as the language is determined automatically.
 
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Sounds like great fun, will give it a try early next week. Many thanks for your efforts :)
 
Great idea !

Will train soon.

Any rom md5sum ?
 
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btw, if you press the Pandorakey while in mame, strange things happen.
 
This is a great little idea! I was put off the previous score compos due to lazyness of submitting scores - but this is more accessible it seems! :)

I hope you can add more games and maybe more emulators ;) :D
 
Here is a little update for your logo:

rot.png

Hope you like it :)

Just a quick sketch. I can work further on this if you like it.
 
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Here is a little update for your logo:

attachicon.gif
rot.png

Hope you like it :)

Just a quick sketch. I can work further on this if you like it.
I like where you're going there; 9s that the right size? goodness seems small on my big monitor :eek:

The only thing I'm not convinced about is the background "paintbrush rainbow splash" type bit; maybe a black background with pellets around the outside (power pellets in the corner, maybe? :) -- or mix in some Donkey Kong barrels, etc. But I definately like where you're aiming, with the stick and button and ghosts and such :) (and thanks muchly, you know how bad I am at artwork :)

jeff
 
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Will try it today. Promised ;) Wouldn't it be good, if you sync the profiles with the server? Would make recovering much easier.
The profiles are of course on the server as well, but if someone loses everything .. it'd be manual right now to figure out which profile is theres, out of possibly hundreds or thousands of them :)

Just tried it and like it :)

Suggestion for the frontend:

Set the nubmodes to joystick when launching the game via the frontend and set them back to mouse when quitting advmame.

This way, you can navigate the frontend with the nubs.

Maybe I am a bit sensitive to this, but my touchscreen is broken ;)

edit: typo: ...support out friends... -> ...support our friends...

Also, the dragonbox link can go to www.dragonbox.de as the language is determined automatically.
Yes, quite, regarding the nub-modes, was thinking the same thing. I'll nab the typo :)

This is a great little idea! I was put off the previous score compos due to lazyness of submitting scores - but this is more accessible it seems! :)

I hope you can add more games and maybe more emulators ;) :D
yeah, one of the challenges with ROT1 was complex rules we'd all dreamt up, and book-keeping; I figured, hey, this shoudl be automatable, right? Make it painless, and they will come :)


I've thought about adding other systems in (ie: SNES, say), but other platforms are much less well defined; I mean, every arcade board is unique, but one of the things the MAME guys did swimmingly was try to map out where in RAM the highscore tables are (not how they're formatted, just where at least.) For consoles, its much less defined .. though some with save-ram etc sure, but its a big glop full of game save data too. Arcade is just scores, generally, so nice and easy to figure out on a per-game basis.

Simply excellent !  

My highscore is 89790, still tryhing to reach 100,000 :)
hey, no fair, we got a pro ;)

What about the dip switches ?
Really, if we want to get serious we need to sync a standardized set of configs .. .advancerc, dip settings; and if you're nuts, you also gotta make sure nothing else is running on the device (people forcing slowdowns to get an edge, say), and so on .. but I don't really want to go that far. Not yet anyway :eek: So standard dip settings .. I suppose the number of men per quarter and such could be in the way. Maybe I should take out the dip menu ...

jeff

edit:

FWIW, I think I fixed the sorting issue I introduced yesterday :)
 
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Suggestion anyway you can automatically grab screen grabs of the score when the person dies at the end this could be used as proof also
 
Suggestion anyway you can automatically grab screen grabs of the score when the person dies at the end this could be used as proof also
Theres no standardized way to know any of that .. ie: I'd have to modify the emu driver for each game (and required analysis to detect it), so too much effort. Some games woudl have known cheats for upping your lives etc, so not purely brutal, but still way too much effort :)

I could enable recording that stores all the random number generations and input choices and such, and then during sync it could upload the playback files that go with the score.. but that too is sort of hard to work with.

I'm reluctant to assume the worst.. especially in our community. I always try to 'assume peopel do the right thing' and 'trust people'.. *shrug*

If we go wider audience, supporting other devices, or even updating MAME-upstream for a general method of editing scores and so on... then perhaps go all hardcore. But thats not my scope right now.. (only got so much time, lets just have some fun with it :)

jeff

How long a score table should we keep? Currently 25 .. but if some people are really really good and just obliterate everyone off the top tier.. maybe I shoudl keep top-100 or something? It doesn't really matter .. coudl be top-1000 or top-100,000 for all I care :)
 
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Managed to wangle a spare half hour & couldn't resist having a go, all seems to work fine :)

Edit : Top 100 might be worth looking at, would it be a major ball ache to limit people to one entry per high score table?
 
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