I'm making an updated roster for the 1988 season. Not very hard since I'm only changing 2 teams, but how do I change the names of the teams. Can't find the option in the RBI Manager. Also, when the game is over and the little newspaper screen pops up, none of the colors change then. Is there anyway to change the team names in the menus and stuff and on that newspaper screen?
I had the same questions before.
What you need to use is a hex-editing program. I use Hexecute these days. It really doesn't matter what you use, just get something from zophar.net.
Once you have the hex-editor, open the rom and then you'll need to change the data manually. With a table you'll find the team names quickly. The colors are a little harder to find, but someone can show you where to find them.
If you need help with the hex-editing, I or someone else can help. It's really useful for editing since you can change so many things that the manager can't. Hope this helps.
thanks, I'll look there. Also, if this program is so powerful, then is it possible to add more teams to the game? or possibly more players?
Changing the team names is a bit of a pain. I'm not sure which instance of the name you're referring to tho. The little "ST" team abbreviations (such as when you pick your team) aren't too bad. Note that they're graphics tiles, and you'd need to edit the ROM directly. If you're meaning the "ST.LOUIS WINS" at the end of the game, I'm still not 100% sure on that one. The tiles which make the big newspaper font are there, but I haven't found where the mappings are stored to make the team names.
The colors at the end of the game are on a different pallete table. There are seperate tables for attract mode, fielding POV, batting POV, and game over (newspaper) screens. Evidently RBI Manager doesn't bother changing all of them. Are you using the licensed or unlicensed ROM to edit? Or, if you're not sure, what is the exact file size of the ROM? I can give you the offset to change, but it's different depending on which ROM you're using.
Nightwulf
I'm using the unlicensed version. And as for changing the team names, I really only care about changing the names in the menu and during the games. The newspaper part of it isn't that important.
There isn't any way to add more teams or players to the game. It's possible that we may at some point be able to edit the Japanese ROM and take advantage of the extra team, but I'm not there yet.
The palettes for team colors in the "Game Over" POV are at offset $131BB in the unlicensed ROM. Unless you're loosely familiar with NES palettes, this probably won't mean much to you. If you're comfortable digging through your ROM with a hex editor, try copying 30 bytes starting at offset $19EB8 to $131BB. This should even the colors out. It might not; it's late and I'm tired. I'll dig up accurate offsets later if those are wrong.
Changing the team icons isn't fun either. Actually that's something I intended to add into my editor, in some far-off day when I have the time to work with it. Your best bet for now is to use a tile editor (Tile Layer Pro is my recommendation), look for the icons, and redraw them yourself.
Nightwulf
Follow everything Nightwolf says, that's how I got going on my roms.
I thought I'd mention that the Japanese rom, FS87, was only a little harder to edit. You can't use the RBI manager with it, but once you learn the hex-editing, you'll find it's faster and more reliable than the RBI manager. I changed just about everything in the FS87 rom, but I sure do miss the errors.
On another note, the palatte table in the RBI manager has the same hex values as what needs to be changed in the rom for team colors. To select your color, just find one you like, and see what it's value is (00-3f), then substitute it into the correct places.
how do you change the stats of the players using numbers instead of just the sliding bar. I wanna try to make it accurate, and its hard to tell with the sliders. If I can edit using numbers, then i'll be able to come up with some formula.
Take Gary Pettis, this is what he looks like as data:
00 19 2c 3b 3b 30 3a 01 6c 05 14 f7 02 8c 00 00.
00 is his place in the lineup (1st batter)
19 2c 3b 3b 30 3a is P e t t i s. If you look at the tiles (graphics) for RBI, you'll find the capitol and lowercase alphabet in there.
the 01 means he bats left (00 is right)
6c is his batting average
05 is his homeruns
14 is his contact rating
f7 02 is his power rating
8c is his speed
the 00 00 is not used.
I'm sorry that I can't elaborate more on this, but I'm way short of time, so I'm probably being confusing. There's a whole lot of steps involved in hex-editing, hard to explain.
If I have time, I could change the team names and colors for you if you post what you have so far on your rom. The only part that takes any real time is changing the in-game team names (Bo, Ca, etc.) since they need to be 'drawn'. That way you could focus on editing everything else with players by still using the RBI manager.
I had neglected to mention that the only reason I don't use the manager, is because it has saving problems where data gets really screwed up sometimes. Otherwise, it's great.
Yeah, I experienced those saving problems a couple of times. I'll edit it that way, but can you tell me how to find the players in the file.
Need to use a table. I use Tabular to make a table, then I open the rom and my table in Hexposure for the editing. The table should be 0-9=00-09, A-Z=0a-23, a-z=28-41, empty space is 24, period is 25.
So when the table and rom are both loaded, you can read the player names in the data.
The player data is kept in two places in the rom, but for some reason, only the second group is used. Only edit it. (I may be wrong here, but all the RBI roms I've hacked are this way.) I believe the player chunk you want to edit starts at 00010010.
You can also find other text in the game while the table is loaded, jus scroll through and you'll find it. If you change anything, rmember it must be kept the same length, for example, you want to rename Boston as Chicago. Well, you'd be over by 1 letter, and that will really mess things up in the game. So you'd want to make something that fits, like _Cubs_, where the spaces fill in to keep it 6 characters long.
In summary, get a table maker and hex-editor program and try it out. Remember to make a copy of your game in case you accidentally frag it when you're editing.
I had those problems with rbi manager, but then i tried a new method, and it's worked every since.
When editing a team, load the rom, edit only one team at a time, after it's complete, click ok, then click save, then re-load the rom, and do it again for the next team.
What I do to change the text and the team names on the ten teams of tengen screen, i open nesticle, write down the hex number for each word, and then open hexspose, and edit by adding the new hex for the text I wanted. Example
On my 2k3 rom, "American" was changed to "Sf"
|A|m|e|r|i|c|a|n| which is |oa|34|2c|39|30|2a|28|35|
to
| | | |S|f| | | | which is |24|24|24|1c|2d|24|24|24|
Note that you have to use the same amount of spaces that existed before. So you cant fit "Tampa Bay" in for "Boston". I just used abbreviations to keep it simple.
i also try to place my abbreviations in the center of the word, otherwise they appear too far off under the player.
A tile editor is the easiest way to edit the team abbreviations on the select game screen. Instead of drawing, I pull letters out of the game that match the abbreviations, then replace the abbreviations with the letter graphics that are allready in the game.
So instead of Houston having an H with an O in the side of it, I just use a capital H in one slot, and a lowercase O in the other.
I think thats it for now, im no expert, but this is the fastest way I have found.
Thanks