A growing number of games are now becoming High Score Enabled, for FujiNet users.

This is where disks that are normally mounted read-only, have a specially marked range of sectors in the ATR header that are marked as "ok for read-write." When FujiNet encounters one of these sectors, and a write is requested, the FujiNet will temporarily open the disk image for writing, write the new sector, and then quickly re-open the disk image read-only.

Over the last three weeks, we had been finding games in ATR format, with high score tables that were being saved to disk, and changing their headers to mark sectors occupied by their high score tables. Simultaneously, I have been writing small micro-services in C that listen to a game's ATR image, and when modified, scrapes the high score table, and generates a web page, so that others can see the high scores.

I am currently placing High Score Enabled games in the /Atari 8-Bit/Games/High Score Enabled folder on apps.irata.online TNFS, and am placing these files with sufficient permissions so they can be opened read-write when they need to be.

And the scores can be seen here: http://scores.irata.online/

There are a large number of games there, already. (See first pic)

Now, I am starting to add high scores to games that previously didn't have them. An example of this is PAC-MAN. Thanks to AtariWiki V3, I was able to download the source code, and patch the game to add high scores (and fix Inky's color) (see more pictures)

The patched pac-man can be downloaded as part of the fujinet-high-scores repo:
https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-high-scores

(if you do build your own, be sure to run high-score enable on it to mark the last two sectors for high score.)

and both the resulting high-score-enabled ATR and the web scraper can be deployed anywhere, even locally at parties. :)

I made this long post to prove a point, that adding high score capabilities to games that we all can share in, is an attainable goal, and we all could really make a lot of fun for all of us. Let's try! :)

-Thom