One ‘rail’ of the arcade & pinball gaming experience are high scores. While not everyone tries to make a career out of landing world records, gamers both pro and casual can get plenty of excitement out of tracking their score progress. Or showing it off to others to enjoy. I’ve done that at my own arcade this week, setting up a Raspberry Pi with a slideshow screensaver to show leaderboards and top players in a digital billboard manner.
The iScored App
(Thanks to Sean McDermott for the tip; and FYI, this isn’t a paid, or sponsored post; I haven’t tried it out myself yet)
While you have sites like Twin Galaxies and Aurcade for player profiles and tracking scores, that doesn’t mean that they provide the only way to do such things. Enter the freshly launched iScored.
To describe what it is, here’s a description from the iScored website:
It’s a web app that lets you and your pals track your best scores on the pinball machines and arcade games in your game room!
It supports a wide variety of devices and configurations: Tablet, PC, MacOS, iPad, Raspberry Pi3 — pretty much anything with a decent web browser. You can use it with or without a keyboard and mouse. If you really want to get fancy, use it with a big touchscreen mounted on a wall. All you need is a laptop or a stick computer to run the screen.
Pretty straightforward. There are other features to be implemented but as it is, it is a fully functional piece of software. Here is a screenshot from one of the options menus; you have to do some setup for the games you have but it looks easy to do:
It does sound like it is more for a home environment than a commercial arcade however; the latter would be of interest to me. Of course, someone could install it on their phone and add games from their favorite local arcade to self-track. Either way, it is $20 for “lifetime access”. Here’s a demo and overview of the app in action; you can also check out the FAQ here:
What do you think of this new app from the info? You can visit the official website here.
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It looks good but it doesn’t provide more than a simple spreadsheet.
A really good score tracking system for a game room or arcade would look like this:
– It can run locally on a LAMP server without any external internet connection necessary. So you can just setup a small network using a raspberry pi as a server, some older computers as terminals and a wifi access point in that game room that has no internet.
– You have one admin user who creates the normal participants accounts and the matches.
– The participants then enter the scores via the web interface themselves by using the terminals provided or the their own wifi enabled device. And they always need to be “signed” by their opponent of the match.
So when a player enters his score he also sees the score of his opponent for that match with a button “This is correct”.