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Intellivision fantasy sports idea


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I have ideas for the sports games: Instead of generic HOME and VSTR, the games can be programmed to have special Inty themed teams with their own colors. A person would be designated to have the teams play each other (comp. v. comp. in the Super Pro games), and have a website for a schedule, game results, etc.

 

I have already designed the baseball teams on this page:

http://tacrec.50webs.com/IBL/teams.htm

 

Other sports games would have similar teams. I know the player colors have limitations, but those can be overcome with proper planning.

 

I am asking for help with this because I don't know Inty programming. The only change that needs to be made is that the player colors in the game can be changed for each game. I was thinking a selection screen could be added to the start of the game.

 

Any input or volunteers are welcome.

Edited by tacrec
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Hi, tacrec,

 

The problem is that there is no such tutorial, and creating one would be a rather large endeavor. My guess is this is the reason you haven't received any responses.

 

As many other communities of technical people, you will generate a lot more interest if your questions are narrow and focused in scope. Think, "how do I screw two 2x4s together so that they don't fall apart?" rather than "can someone tell me how to build a house?"

 

First off, I would suggest getting acquainted with Intellivision programming. Unfortunately, this involves learning CP-1610 Assembly Language. Fortunately, there are plenty of people here and in other fora available and willing to help you with this.

 

To hack the ROM, you will need to disassemble it. You should familiarize yourself with Joe Zbiciak's wonderful SDK-1600 (see the links in the pinned threads). It includes a set of utilities, one of which is a ROM disassembler called dasm1600. This will convert the binary into Assembly Language code, that you can then analyse for your purposes.

 

I know that this sounds like a large undertaking, and it is, but you have to start somewhere. Moreover, learning these basic skills will allow you to hack any game ROM--or even better--program your own. As someone who started pretty much from scratch, like you, and ended up releasing my own game, I can tell you it is infinitely rewarding. :)

 

-dZ.

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For EXEC based games there are common EXEC calls for defining GRAM cards (as well as the pointer in the ROM header block info). So it might be better to start on an older game, get a disassembly of it, look for these EXEC calls, understand the data format and then make some changes. As you get more experienced, move up in complexity.

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For EXEC based games there are common EXEC calls for defining GRAM cards (as well as the pointer in the ROM header block info). So it might be better to start on an older game, get a disassembly of it, look for these EXEC calls, understand the data format and then make some changes. As you get more experienced, move up in complexity.

 

I believe the NBA Basketball and MLB Baseball from Mattel Electronics were some of the first games made for the Intellivision (definitely MLB Baseball), and they used the EXEC.

 

I also think that the SDK-1600 disassembler also identifies strings and renders them as text data, so that could be something easy to find. :)

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Strange, I do not get that error. I actually got a disassembly. I used the following command line:

$ dis1600 Baseball.bin -f Baseball.asm

The output I received was:

SEGMENT ofs 0000  len 1000  addr 5000  FLAGS: R---P

It looks pretty good.

 

-dZ.

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Yes I have the latest version of SDK. I tried your command and now it says "Could not find .ROM or .BIN".

 

What's the $ in front of your command? How are you running it?

 

Actually, baseball itself is not the game I want to modify, I want to hack "World Championship Baseball". I have the rom for it, but it is in .int format. Don't know if that can be disassembled.

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Gotcha. The "$" in my example is the command line prompt; you can ignore it.

 

An ".intv" file is just a BIN+CFG file in drag. I believe you can just safely rename the extension to ".bin" and try again.

 

Let me know if this helps.

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My ideal situation would be to customize the player colors in Nostalgia, however it only partially works. Some of the players seem hardcoded to red or blue.

 

If they are hard-coded, they can be changed. You'll just have to find where the colours are set. Check out the "stic.txt" file that came with the SDK-1600 for documentation on colours and their values.

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