Hardball Custom Team Disc Creator

[rcamp48]

I believe this falls into the programming section: 30 to 35 years ago I wrote a program for Hardball, the Baseball game, that allowed a person to replace the original baseball teams with modern teams in Hardball. I was much younger then and smarter than I am now so looking back at this program written in Atari Basic, What the heck did I do to write this? I don't even remember doing that , but it was in the KWEST library, so I am including it first.

 

Once I figure out exactly what I did I will recreate the teams with 2019 teams, there may be some users on here that can look at my basic programs and tell me what I did? Because I am having a senior moment when it comes to remembering what I did 35 years ago.

 

Here is the three programs in one zip file, Hardball Creator Disk, Hardball Creator Docs Disk, and of course Hardball itself. I may have changed the information with a sector editor and copied the text to data strings in the program. And from what I can see I wrote to specific spots on the COPY of Hardball itself, but beyond there? Russ

 

 

Hardball Team Disk Creator.zip

[rcamp48]

Problem , when I wrote this program I protected the basic source, any unprotectors out there?

 

[Rybags]

Do you remember methods used?  It looks to me like something a bit more complicated than simply overwriting the variable name table with random stuff.

[AtariNerd]

Getting an IDP.ALEXA.51 warning via my AntiVirus. Depending on who you ask, it could be a false-positive or malware.

[AtariGeezer]

The Menu program on the Hardball Team Creator Disk is the only one I see with the VNT wiped.  ATR Tools can display it ok...

[rcamp48]

I wrote it myself its from an original disk

And it loads the data of the disk , so be careful you don't write anything else to it... Russ

 

Edited July 6, 2019 by rcamp48
Update

[rcamp48]

2 hours ago, AtariGeezer said:

The Menu program on the Hardball Team Creator Disk is the only one I see with the VNT wiped.  ATR Tools can display it ok...

Yes that program loads all of the data needed from the disk , sector by sector, it was written so that a person could copy from the disk to the copy of the Hardball game. Could you do me a favour and shoot me an unprotected copy of the menu program so I can update it ????  Russ

 

[rcamp48]

3 hours ago, Rybags said:

Do you remember methods used?  It looks to me like something a bit more complicated than simply overwriting the variable name table with random stuff.

ya basically I remember what I did with the program.... I got an unprotected listing but i can't save it

 

[_The Doctor__]

Trojan alert as well, not sure it's false. I suspect it should be put in a sandbox and have the Atari stuff yanked out and put it back into another compressed container to see what's going on.

[AtariGeezer]

9 hours ago, rcamp48 said:

Yes that program loads all of the data needed from the disk , sector by sector, it was written so that a person could copy from the disk to the copy of the Hardball game. Could you do me a favour and shoot me an unprotected copy of the menu program so I can update it ????  Russ

 

Here ya go, just the sector containing the VNT was written to...

Hardball Team Creator Disk.atr

[rcamp48]

My program will trigger some type of alert as it reads sectors from the Master disk and writes to the copy of Hardball, sector by sector, if you look at the basic program , you will notice that the dat is sector numbers, for both reading and writing , that is how I get all of the team stats over to the new disk. I originally edited the master with a sector editor and put in all of the stats then wrote the program to read them in. I believe the original disk (Hardball) has the stats from sector 113 to sector 128 but without looking at the program , I am unsure. 

 

I am going to put in 11 new teams from the 2018-2019 world series so there will be quite a few teams added soon.    Russ

 

[rcamp48]

Here is a new Version: It still reads from disc and writes from didk, let me know if it triggers any malware...

Hardball Team Disk Creator Unprotected.atr

[rcamp48]

Basically what I need is a program that will allow me to code the hex numbers for the new player stats in Hardball, I am using a hex editor to put the new stats onto a new disk, I have statistics for the latest Baseball World Series and it would be nice to have all of the players from each team in 2019 , with their stats.

 

What I need is a basic routine to convert a decimal number to hex, I can do the rest to code the player stats for 2019.

 

This means that there will be 12 or more Hardball Creator Discs made available, each one with 11 different team lineups, I coded it 30 years ago, now I need help coding the part from decimal to hex, I will subtract 48 decimal points from each letter then write the results in hex with a sector editor to the Creator disk. 

 

Can someone write a subroutine to just convert decimal to hex, I can do the rest, ie: subtracting 48 from the ascii value of each letter, then converting that char into ascii and finally writing to disk the hex code. Whoever comes up with the first reliable routine to do the dec to hex conversion will get their name immortalized into my program as credit for the code. 

 

I would prefer it to be in Atari Basic as I have Action! but don't know how to really use it efficiently.

 

Russ

 

[rcamp48]

Never mind I found it online now to make the program.

Russ