HIGHSCORE! Wait, whered it go?

Alright, long delay between updates as I havent had access to the WIP case. Between my mate going to QLD on business for two weeks, and upon his return going in for surgery, I have had little time to get out and work on the case. Since I have now spent two weeks only able to lie down and either watch Stargate or play Eternal Sonata on my PS3, I've gone half mad and decided to set up The Projects components in a old computer case and tinker with the software/hardware.

Ive picked myself up a Dremel 300 from Bunnings and a few extra bits for it from Jaycar, along with a peice of sheet steel from Bunnings. This will enable me to cut out some of the finer square holes/etc out of the sheet, which was posing a problem (cutting out 30mmx 25mm square out of 6mm sheet steel would be difficult with a standard tool) I shall do some work on this tomorrow (as tomorrow it is when I shall be next working on the case, wound or no wound)

Ive also done some work on the software, mainly MAME. Ok, so by 'Work' I mean playing Bobble Bubble for a while (and still only a maximum of level 32 on Easy starting with 5 lives). However, one thing I have done is re-enable High Score saving for games in MAME.

MAME's goal is to achieve 'perfect' emulation of cabinets, or as close to it as possible. Also, many MAME games did not save High Score tables. This is due to the original games not saving the high score in their firmware. Why? Because most arcade ops back then would have left them running for weeks or months on end, meaning that saving the high score table was not really a issue. This meant on power-down high scores were lost, and when you quit mame and start again its the same as a power-down. There is a autosave feature in MAME, but who wants to start up MAME and find themselves halfway through a game they rage-quitted?

MAME devs patched in a hack of saving high scores into MAME for a while (somewhere in the originals 0.60 -> 1.03 region from memory) but then removed it as it was causing more problems than good. Their goal was to recreate the original hardware, not add features.

Of course, someone had to add it back in for people like us. MKCHAMP over at the BYOAC forums was that person, who has released patches and compiles of newer MAME vers with the old highscore saver enabled. I found a highscore enabled MAME compile and matching highscore.dat file here (http://highscore.mameworld.info/)

Ive installed and tested it - works a treat for all the games ive tested (ok, ive only tested one, Bubble Bobble). Thanks guys!

Ive also got myself a very cheap pair of USB powered speakers for the box (http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=XC5191&keywords=usb+speakers&form=KEYWORD) which should be excelnt for the box (Analogue volume control and no clunky transformer for power [The more expensive ones all had digital volume, which isnt what I want])