The other night, on my Twitch stream, I was discussing the pro and cons of the DK high score save kits that are currently available. To my knowledge there are 3 kits available: the
Braze kit, the
Remix kit, and the
Hippel kit. I'm starting this thread to get some feedback from the community.
The Hippel kit was discussed on DKF a couple years ago, at the link above. I'm sure Sock Master can answer any questions about his kit. I'm not sure who/what has the best info on the Braze kit. The programming aspects of all this are beyond me, so I'm only relating much of what I've heard or discussed with others.
My main concern about the Braze and Remix kits was the lack of support for scores above 999,900. As Sock put it: "These kits fail the players the want them the most." The Hippel kit addresses this, but inserts its own code during the process (as does the Braze kit). Sock's Remix kit is the only one that doesn't affect the original code in any way. The Braze and Hippel kits are apparently not using your PCB's roms; they're using their own.
So, at minimum, I think a "new" high score kit should have the following requirements:
1) Recognize scores over 999,900
2) Use the original roms on the PCB
3) No alteration of the game code
DKF currently accepts scores that were set on boards with any of these kits installed, but going forward I think a "better-safe-than-sorry" approach is best...especially since the decision to allow D2K kit scores was made before it was understood how the game was run off the daughter board and not the PCB. I'm not sure I'm interested in all the other bells and whistles that these kits offer, especially if requires modifying the game code.
I'm not nominating Sock Master to make a new high score save kit, but in the event that we see a Remix 2.0, it might give him some ideas.
The main idea floating around in my head is a save kit that incorporates user profiles. When you install the kit you can set up some number of different profiles, and when you start a game you play under your profile. You can change profiles by going into the save kit settings. This is important to me because there are two DK players in my household of (currently) different skill level. I could easily fill the top 5 slots on the machine...but that's no fun if Katie wants to see her high scores. So, Player 1, Player 2, Player 3, etc. profiles, and some kind of combined leaderboard.
With a separate page for each player you eliminate the need for a column showing the initials, and then you have room for more info...like level reached and settings used. In the combined version you use accepted competition settings, so you can retain the names for comparison but nix the column showing the settings. Quick 'n dirty mock-up below, showing space for 10 scores.
All of this would be in the background of how you actually play and enter your initials though. So, a game would end normally, you put it in your initials, and the game would display the top 5 like it normally does. Only when you enter the save kit profile page do you see all this other stuff. Resetting the cab clears the normal top 5, but the profile scores are saved.
Of course, all of this would still have to work under a "competition-acceptable" scenario...no modification of the game code or bypassing of the PCB roms...and ideally would recognize 1M+ scores.
Thoughts?
