I'm not entirely sure if this is the right place to ask this, but since the hi score post is stickied in this forum, it made sense to me.



I am looking for a way to covert the .hi files that are generated with the hiscore.dat file into text readable values, such as "NLA, 10000, DEW, 7900".

I've tried doing the conversion myself however I am not versed enough in C to really understand how this data is being written to the .hi file.



I'm reading in the file as byte values, but after that I'm having no luck, I'm hoping someone here has, and knows how to parse these files externally.



My reasoning for this, is I'd like to create a little app that would parse these scores and submit them to a webserver I have,

so my friends and I with MAME could compete against each others scores without sharing a copy of these .hi files.

BadBoyBill - Incorporated HiToText into Hyperspin.

bLAZER - Decoded many games for XML format.

games for XML format. Cananas - Found Mr. Driller score table; updated the hiscore.dat and decoded many games. A HUGE HiToText contributor.

games. A HUGE HiToText contributor. chillinmame - Supports the HiToText genre wheel for HyperSpin on every HiToText update

dna disturber - Deciphered many games, updated the hiscore.dat. A HUGE HiToText contributor.

games, updated the hiscore.dat. A HUGE HiToText contributor. headkaze - Created much of the basic structure and very good at guiding me in the right direction. Also integrated HiToText into CPWizard.

NOP - Decoded many .hi files and really helped motivate me to continue this project.

redhorse - Deciphered R-Type, and Slap Fight.

RetroBorg - Decoded .hi formats for Juno First, Berzerk, and River Patrol.

Tom Speirs - Incorporated HiToText into GameEx.

Wob - Deciphered many games.

games. Zallax - Deciphered U.N. Squadron, Tron, and Discs of Tron

And to all the testers, thanks for finding the bugs.

Download links:Use the hiscore.dat-astic for the most up-to-date hiscore.dat file:The source is now no longer downloadable, it can be accessed through Sourceforge SVN. Instructions can be found here Cananas has written up some documentation that is much easier to understand than my rambling posts when implementing an XML entry (They are only a little outdated, the majority of the information is in these documents. See my supplemental posts or the what's new from 4-28-2010 onward):HiToText is a command line app that allows you to convert .hi files to text and spits it to stdout.The current version of the hiscore.dat file we're using to generate the .hi files that we are deciphering is also attached. I'm attaching it mostly so we can ensure that the .hi files being used are the same, and if we decide to add some games that aren't currently supported. (Monster Farm Jump anyone?However, we need help deciphering individual games' hi scores in memory before these can ever be complete.To decipher a game's memory, start by opening the .hi file for a game in a hex editor such as WinHex, and try and determine how the scores are stored for the game. You can look at NOPs posts below to see a good example of how to explain the game's memory format here so we can convert the explanation into code. Every game can be different, so it's going to take a lot of work, and we'll need help from more than one or two people, so if you want to share your hi scores with all of your friends for your favorite game, do us a favor and decipher it, and we'll include it for you. Below is a list of games we've currently deciphered.I'm sure more people would like to help if they thought they could, and while recruiting my non-technical brother, I realized I should explain what he does to help me get some of these games decoded just a little bit faster.Basically, I'm getting pretty good at actually decoding the .hi files. Games like Road Runner (Atari) would be difficult if I hadn't already put the time in on Marble Madness which use the same space saving score and name coding.Because of this, more of my time getting a game into HiToText is usually ensuring that all the possible characters allowed in the name of the hiscore are taken into consideration. So I'm regularly beating hi scores and putting my name as: ",.-" to see what these characters map out to.What I've got my brother doing, is beating hi scores, and using every possible character that the game allows, taking a screenshot of all the high scores, and e-mailing those screenshots and the .hi file to me, so I can spend more of my time programming and decoding the .hi file.One important note about this, I never need all the alpha-numeric scores, usually just "ABZ", "abz", and "019", as every game so far has a pattern for these characters, that make needing "CDE" and so on pretty pointless.For something like Captain America and the Avengers, the game only stores 5 scores at a time, but has a lot of characters that could not be on the same hiscore table at the same time, so my brother took multiple screenshots, and made copies of the captaven.hi file for those screenshots and sent me an e-mail with this information, deleted the old captaven.hi file and started again with the characters that wouldn't fit in the first hiscore table, I ended up with 4 different captaven.hi files, but was able to capture every possible character allowed with the screenshots.I'm hoping that some of you that have games you'd like to see decoded would be willing to upload their hiscore screenshots, and .hi OR .nv files to this post. Please zip them up as this board does not actually accept .nv or .hi extensions, and converting these to .txt corrupt them.A Google spreadsheet is listed here that shows information about what games are deciphered, what games people are working on, and what games we need help with to decipher.If you'd like to have access to edit this spreadsheet, as you'd like to do work without someone duplicating it, or have information about a particularly difficult game to decipher, please post here or e-mail me and I will give you access to modify the spreadsheet.Original post:People I'd like to thank for helping this project (alphabetical order):