junk FS87 rom hack

[Beanball]

Thought I'd throw this onto the rom dogpile.
This was meant for straight pitch ball, so the pitchers don't have their actual curve ratings.  32 new players were made for the additional 2 teams.  Most Japanese characters were changed into a customized lowercase English alphabet.  The players are all over the place because of trades.  Obviously, not everything was changed, I just stuck with what mattered to me most.

In other words, this is just here to see what the game looks like when it's translated and touched up to a certain point.
2 drawbacks: no bops, sidearm righties bat as if they're lefties (try pulling a ball with Bedrosian or Saberhagen).

If anyone wants to dick around with the game, I'll help you through it.

[Gantry]

Just played a couple innings, nice job!

Must have been tough to replace the Japanese alphabet, I see you used a combination of upper and lowercase letters.  Was that out of necessity?

Outside of the teams, how different are the data formats between FS and RBI?  Same 16-byte field for player data?

[Gantry]

I have another question regarding the skinny, lower-case letters.  How exactly are they stored in FS 87?  Is it one letter per byte?  I ask becaues I'm trying to find the "blahlblahbl" text from the paper in the ROM.  Looks like it uses a different character set than the normal or super-size text and I'm wondering if each letter is one byte or two letters per byte...

[Beanball]

For lowercase, I replaced the Japanese tiles, then made double letter tiles since there were still over 20 Japanese tiles left over.  Used that to compensate for there being only 4 spaces instead of 6 (RBI).  It looks ugly, but it helps to identify people.

The batter data is identical, other than having 4 bytes for the name rather than 6.
Pitchers are different.
RBI: 1(pos), 2-7(name), 8(drop/throws), 9(ERA), 10-12(speed1-3), 13(curve), 14(stamina), 15-16(??)
FS87: 1(pos), 2-5(name), 6(throws), 7(ERA), 8-10(speed1-3), 11(curve left), 12(curve right), 13(drop), 14(stamina), 15-16(??).

ERA in FS87 is increments of .04 (0.00-9.96), there are two curve abilities (so you can make someone throw great curves but have no screwball).
It made a lot more sense to combine the drop and throwtype together.

Those are really the only differences.  Otherwise, you can nearly cut and paste player data from RBI to FS87.  And that's what I did for all the RBI players.

[Gantry]

Interesting, and the extra curve rating in FS87 means you can eliminate some sort of subtle left/right curve setting for the two unknown fields....

Kind of tough to only work with 4 spaces for names.  That and the no BOP will probably keep most people from using FS87 for a 12-team RBI ROM...

It looks like the original RBI only has two tiles for the tiny letters, "bl" and "ah" - the only thing you can do is edit those tiles to change the ending paper, which is shown below...

[Beanball]

Yeah, the blah blah stuff in the newspaper is about the same thing as my 2 letter blocks.  One block is (bl) and the next is (ah).  If you open up RBI in a tile editor, the blah tiles are at the bottom of the screen on the first field of tiles.

When you open my rom in a hex-editor, you'll see player names are all garbled.  Eddie Murray looks like <Mu..> since the 3rd byte is <rr> and 4th is <ay>.  So in the game it looks like Murray, even though it's only 4 spaces.  

It's really only aesthetics.  I need to keep a written table of a player's name in code if I put him on another team.  Not very efficient.