BUG: LIZ high score not saved

We go through the effort to record it but it is not saved after the game and resets to the default... Seen this several times. Would be nice to see it in the high scores list as well.

iOS6 iPad 3

HiTechKoke said:

We go through the effort to record it but it is not saved after the game and resets to the default... Seen this several times. Would be nice to see it in the high scores list as well.

iOS6 iPad 3

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This is a known issue that affects all the tables with secondary scores (MM's Castle/Damsel/Peasant/Joust/Troll/Catapult Champions, CV's Party and Cannonball Champions, SS's Spider Champion and the list of Favorite Stiffs, and many others.) Apparently the ROMs have integrity checks on them that prevent this information from being modified and stored correctly through the emulation framework. Last I heard, FarSight is still working on a solution.

The brute-force solution would be to take the virtualization one step further, and implement a nonvolatile save and restore on the entire pinball machine's RAM and CPU state. The ROM code would never know it had stopped executing, let alone been monkeyed with.

I'm guessing this would open a can of worms. The amount of data to save wouldn't, I think, be prohibitively large (even in the 1990s these tables didn't have a huge amount of RAM), but it'd interact with all their existing machine-state-handling code. Also, since we know the emulator sometimes gets confused by glitches in the simulated "physical" world, there would need to be an option exposed to the user to reset the table for the case where it gets into some unplayably messed-up state (which would also erase all this data).

So how does Farsight manage to save the regular high scores? Do they just keep a copy of a small part of the RAM? If so, it shouldn't be a great leap to also do it for these secondary high scores and achievements.