Adding highscores saving to games

[Crazy C]

Hi forum.

It would be nice to have a highscore saver in some games playable on UAE4ALL2 and UAE4ARM like Alien Breed, Alien Breed II, Fire and Ice, Super Cars II...
They have a highscore table but don't keep the highscores after playing.
Would someone be able and willing to add this to some games?
I'm not able to do this 😕. Maybe other people are interested in this, too... 😊

[Anakirob]

Originally Posted by Crazy C

Hi forum.

It would be nice to have a highscore saver in some games playable on UAE4ALL2 and UAE4ARM like Alien Breed, Alien Breed II, Fire and Ice, Super Cars II...
They have a highscore table but don't keep the highscores after playing.
Would someone be able and willing to add this to some games?
I'm not able to do this 😕. Maybe other people are interested in this, too... 😊

WHDLoad adds this functionality to most games. Use WHDLoad.

And I'm not 100% about the Alien Breed games having this feature, but most Team17 games featured the option to save highscores to disk in the options menu. That was generally one nice feature about Team17 games.

Yes, even if i never understood the point to propose it as an option. As a programmer if you want your game save highscores then just do it. If the player doesn't want to save then he just have to keep the disc write protected.

[Anakirob]

Originally Posted by Vollldo

Yes, even if i never understood the point to propose it as an option. As a programmer if you want your game save highscores then just do it. If the player doesn't want to save then he just have to keep the disc write protected.

I'm inclined to agree with you on that one. I recall that a number of games I purchased released before '91 featured hi-score saving to the game disk and the manual would usually advise you to use a write-enabled backup copy. While games made after that time almost certainly lacked the feature. I seem to recall Amiga Power among others made the point, why bother keeping score if you are not going to bother to save said scores?

But I'm guessing that publishers did not want to encourage the practice of copying their disks or maybe they were sick and tired of users not following the instructions in the manual and write-enabling the original game disk, which then becomes corrupted and returned to the publisher for replacement.

Anyway, I might like to add that unless you have some reason to use ADF's exclusively, like for example you have a Gotek or similar device installed in your 1.3 A500, then WHDLoad has many advantages over original ADF's even when run from an emulator. It's not quite as 'noob friendly' as specifying which image you want to play, but it's not too hard, and there are many people on EAB willing to assist with this.

And once it has been set-up to your liking then it's actually a more convenient and good looking way to access your Amiga games library.

And as WHDLoad requires KS 2.04 and above then it's safe to say that pretty much all of the old 1.3 only games available for it have been patched to run on ECS and AGA machines.

I would have appreciate to continue this interesting starting thread, but i quit the forum so i can only reply brievly. Plausible reason indeed! Maybe to protect the disks against resident viruses in memory that can damage a not protected disk on startup only? The player would run the protected disk, the virus would be killed by the game code (ram cleanup) and would unprotect the disc just in time to save hiscores, then reprotect the disk again. In principle, a player would never choose "off" is "on" is avaible, we all wanted to save our scores. But recent events proved me that the most weird tastes are in human nature so who knows lol. Members here will certainly add extra suggestions, a word that i won't dare to prononciate anywhere here.

Concerning WhdLoad now, i would say it's complementary to floppy disks (or Gotek/HxC) and can't replace them totally if you want a full experience (and i know what i mean since i have 2000 cracked floppies, 1500 original ones and also 2500 games on whdload too). Old school spirit first, then materialized item (the floppy itself) and cracktros (a great feeling). Floppy noise add also to the pleasure. Same stuffs than purchased mp3 and a real cd-a, to dematerialize the support doesn't content some people fully because of an abstraction non tangible unpleasant feeling (the young generation is almost totally unsensible to this, they grew up with dematerialized stuffs).

Cheers and have a great dialog here on this thread and others!

[Crazy C]

Well, the games I'm interested in at the moment are Super Cars II, Alien Breed and Fire And Ice and I'm not sure if there are 'versions' of them out there (cracks?) that save the highscores to disk... Worms saves highscores and edited team names etc. and Superfrog I've seen has 'Options' which offers to create a separate save disk for the game where the highscores are written to then, nice.

[Anakirob]

Originally Posted by Crazy C

Well, the games I'm interested in at the moment are Super Cars II, Alien Breed and Fire And Ice and I'm not sure if there are 'versions' of them out there (cracks?) that save the highscores to disk...

I can assure you that the WHDLoad installations for these games do save highscores.

Good luck finding a 'cracked' ADF which does this, I doubt you'll find one.

And the fact is because the WHDLoad installs already have this feature there is very little incentive for anyone to bother cracking these ADF's to your specifications.

You should be able to find pre-insatlled WHDLoad packages for all the games you've mentioned here. I don't think I'm allowed to link to the individual packages on this board, but pointing you to the main URL should be fine.

[Crazy C]

Yes, thanks, I never used Whdload yet, didn't know of this feature.

[Anakirob]

Originally Posted by Crazy C

Yes, thanks, I never used Whdload yet, didn't know of this feature.

No worries as it is a 21st century Amiga application it has not recieved much coverage outside of the Amiga community.

With most casual gamers preferring the ease of just loading up an ADF. And this is perfectly valid.

But if you are considering spending some serious time playing Amiga games then WHDLoad wherever possible is highly recommended. There are a few old bulk packages adding up to more or less 4GB extracted to an Amiga HD once you eliminate all the duplicates for different languages, etc.

If you want a lot of Amiga games rather than just a few games then these are recommended.

It's not every Amiga game with a WHDLoad install, but it's a fair portion of them

These are quite old though and a few games may be both unstable and have newer versions available which fix the bug

-Edit-
While all of these WHDLoad installs are quite accessible via the Workbench you may like to consider using one of the many WHDLoad launcher programs. Such as this one: http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/TinyLauncher.lha