Credit Counter in Games?

[chriss]

Hey guys,

I got a question... a friend of mine loves to play the Mame game Pang. Now he uses a lot of credits to finish the game and I would love to know how much money he would have spent to complete the game. Is there a way to count the credits as soon as a game is started (attract mode + regular) ?

[Brian Hoffman]

Hey guys,

I got a question... a friend of mine loves to play the Mame game Pang. Now he uses a lot of credits to finish the game and I would love to know how much money he would have spent to complete the game. Is there a way to count the credits as soon as a game is started (attract mode + regular) ?

most of these programs have been shunned by mamedev as it would promote using mame in a commertial enviorment where you can track $ etc...

Of course you can always setup a ahk script to record the 5 or 6 key... Mame default coin buttons... Just to see.

I wish I had a better solution for you.

A good read

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=47627.0

[chriss]

thanks for the link, brian!

you are still awesome

[bkenobi]

Does this even still work? I haven't tried it, but does CoinDrop work with the new input system the MAMEDevs introduced in v0.117? This was written in the MAME v0.103 time frame, so I seriously doubt it will work on current builds. If it does, awesome! I'll probably give this a try this weekend if I get a chance. Thanks for the link...

EDIT: After thinking about it, the main point was to track the coins being inserted into the cab just to see how many were used. In that respect, having MAME recognize the inputs from this program are not desired. As such, this program should work great! Well, it won't tell you what game you were running when you inserted all those coins, and it won't give you a nice display when you are done, but it will keep track of your coins...I think.

If it were me, I might consider just programming something in AHK that tracked the coin button and wrote it to a file. Then, I would have an emulator with a couple scripts in there. I would have:

* Reset - Reset the coin count to 0 in the file

* Display - display a screen showing the number of coins and maybe the total play time (or any other info you want to keep track of)

This could automatically be reset for each different game. In fact, now that I think about it, you could use a modified version of the MAME_Loader script to track the credits AND the game that's being played. So, if you load a game, it will record the number of credits used and the time it was run for that game.

This would be a cool thing that Tom might consider adding to the statistics page since it would be fairly simple... Maybe a feature request?

[Brian Hoffman]

thanks for the link, brian!

you are still awesome

Thanks!

I feel like ive been slipping.

[Rapid Fire]

Why not just check the BookKeeping Info?

To get to it in a game, hit Tab, scroll down to BookKeeping Info, and see what it shows for each coin slot.

How to clear it, I dunno, this is just off the top of my head.

[chriss]

it would be nice to have this displayed for each game. coindrop is an interesting approach but it only has an info tab to show you the total amount of inserted coins. The best way would be to have it in the statistics like Games played, coins used for game.

I will post this in the feature request now. Thanks for your thoughts on this!