30 teams in RBI

[Big Hath]

but it couldn't be that difficult.

this gives me hope

[nightwulf]

Nightwulf was completely serious.  So much so that he started talking binary while explaining the step-by-step process.

I vaguely remember you asking if an Apple //gs would work, and I replied "no, it used a 65816 processor, which ironically is very similar to the 65C816 used in the SNES." My nerdliness overshadows my drunkenness.

Nightwulf has 90 days to produce program

Good luck with that. I've been kicking this idea around for over a year. Gantry can vouch, as I mentioned it to him months ago.

[Mr. Blubbo]

Nightwulf was completely serious.  So much so that he started talking binary while explaining the step-by-step process.

I vaguely remember you asking if an Apple //gs would work, and I replied "no, it used a 65816 processor, which ironically is very similar to the 65C816 used in the SNES." My nerdliness overshadows my drunkenness.

Yeah because you were talking to Strassy about an Apple 2.  Then I mentioned the 2 GS and you went into some detailed explanation and exploded my head.

Nightwulf has 90 days to produce program

Good luck with that. I've been kicking this idea around for over a year. Gantry can vouch, as I mentioned it to him months ago.
[/quote]

Months= 2. 

90 days= 3.

Therefore by my elementary mathmatician skills you still have 1 month left.  Stop dragging your feet.

[nomaaa]

can i have the red sox? i'll take the pirates, if not.

[JoeDirt]

I'll take the Yankees and any left over team(s)...

[Reds]

Now ....we should figure out a formula of some sorts to achieve player ratings, and make them uniform....it would seem to make sense....

[Gantry]

Wow, I missed this over the weekend.  Let me try to break it down and ask more questions, as nightwulf and I didn't go into much detail before...

It's possible in that there is a bunch of unused space in the ROM, which theoretically could be used to contain information for more teams. The problem lies in that the free space is strewn out in several places. The real challenge would be restructuring the entire game so that the free areas were in more manageable chunks, and changing code appropriately. Also the team select screen would obviously need to be modified, which is not something I'm good at, but it couldn't be that difficult.

So do you think you have all the free ROM space mapped out, could there possibly be a "Eureka!" section that hasn't been found yet? 

How does the memory allocation of the overstuffed ROM work?  Doesn't that conceivably give us double the space to work with?  Clearly I don't know how this works or nightwulf would have used it already, but I guess I should understand it a little better...

The biggest hurdle I came up with while running this around in my head is that there simply is no room in the name tables for more tiles. There's room for "team icon" tiles for exactly ten teams, and I don't think any more could be squeezed in. Theoretically I think I could move a page of CHR-RAM to the name table then modify specific tiles based on team selection, but I'm not sure if this is possible.

This certainly sounds like a problem...  Can you swap out to, for example, logos in three different name tables at once yet display them all at the same time?  Or would you need to do a "page 1", "page 2", "page 3" if you had a Team Select for 30 teams?

Now that's not exactly what I said. The Apple II (original, plus, //e, //c) used roughly the same processor as the NES. Thus, if you know assembly on an Apple II (or a C64 for that matter), you're well on your way to understanding NES coding. Obviously it's not exactly the same.

Further, and not to shit in any cheerios, but if you haven't had any assembly coding then I don't think you can help with the programming portion.  If you somehow don't know assembly but have a savage knowledge of the basics of assembly (hex, binary, registers etc) then there is a chance...

As an example - I had a good skillset with IBM Mainframe Assembly and a "I sorta remember" skillset with x86 Assembly and was able to pick it up relatively quickly. 

That being said, things like beta testing making logos/rosters etc will be a huge part of the project.  If it was undertaken, the folks who can do the coding will want to focus on that...

The big thing if it's as big of a project as nightwulf thinks is to get more coders.  Especially if there is a lot of gruntwork involved.  Nightwulf and I make sexy bedfellows, but we'd likely need at least a third guy who is really dedicated to keep things going and keep us in line.  I don't want to speak too much for nightwulf, but I at least tend to start a fuckton of projects and have trouble finishing (requote here) - so we need a finisher and someone willing to do the boring stuff...

I know estimates are impossible nightwulf, but do it anyway - if it was just you and me working on this for a few hours a week, how long to you think it would take? 

[nightwulf]

So do you think you have all the free ROM space mapped out, could there possibly be a "Eureka!" section that hasn't been found yet? 

The ROM is entirely mapped out. More comments would be nice, but I haven't had time to go through it with a comb. See attached file.

How does the memory allocation of the overstuffed ROM work?  Doesn't that conceivably give us double the space to work with?

It may. Adding pages is not something I'd like to get into (which could complicate making real cartridges out of this) but is possible. The bulk of the work is restructuring and recoding to find data in new places.

This certainly sounds like a problem...  Can you swap out to, for example, logos in three different name tables at once yet display them all at the same time?  Or would you need to do a "page 1", "page 2", "page 3" if you had a Team Select for 30 teams?

No. Adding extra pages for the team select screen sounds like a plausible idea (ignoring my desire to not add pages, see above), but it's far from the real problem. If I pick team #1 and my opponent picks team #29, icons for both teams need to be in CHR RAM. How they get there is the problem. If it's possible to change specific icons within RAM once a page has been loaded, that would be the way to go. I need to do more research on the PPU memory map and limitations of writing directly to it.

[Bonny]

This is gonna kick so much ass.

[TβG]

i know nothing about coding, etc.  but if the problem is only 'viewing' the team logos on the scoreboard, you could change the scoreboard to always read 'home' and 'visitor'... if that helps the discussion at all.