Hey all,
Me and a few buddies have been obsessing over R.B.I. Baseball 3 for the better part of the last year, and a few months ago decided that we should update it with a 2013 roster.
Instead of hand-bombing all of the modifications into a hex editor, we started to build an interface to import a .csv file of batters, pitchers, team uniform colours, etc to the ROM file. We started the project in Python and quickly realized that we could run it on a webserver and make it available to anyone. Check it out:
http://www.rbi3.ca
While some amazing RBI 3 hacks have come out already, our key feature is the ability for anyone to (fairly) easily create their own fully customized ROM. Kind of like what nightwulf did with RBI 1.
We don't host ROMs on the site (maybe we're being extra cautious? not sure...) so here's the process:
1. Acquire R.B.I. Baseball 3 ROM from wherever you can find it (it's about 192kB)
2. Download a .csv template from http://www.rbi3.ca/create.html
3. Edit the .csv to change lineups, batting stats, pitching stats, uniform colours, error percentages, and the "base year" of the ROM (default is 13).
--- Tip #1: Save the .csv as an Excel format while you're working on balancing stats (so that equations work), then re-save as .csv when done.
--- Tip #2: If you use the default .csv provided, you'll create a fairly-well-balanced end-of-2013 ROM file.
4. Upload the original ROM file and the .csv file to the site and receive back a patched ROM.
Our project is open-source and hosted on Google Code. That's where we have our Issue Tracker of things to do and things to fix, our Wiki where we've documented key hex addresses, some key references who helped us out, and more.
If anyone is interested in working on this with us (or creating a spinoff project), we made some notes on how to set up our dev environment and you can grab the code from here. My CompSci buddy Chet made some good design decisions early on with the Python script - everything is class-based and once you figure those out, it's pretty simple to hack in new features. (my style of programming would have been one long, nasty, linear script!)
Our todo list is looking like this:
- Cosmetic tweaks - I don't know anything about changing graphics yet.
- More back-end validation of .csv-supplied data; providing better error feedback to users.
- Enabling modification of other text strings through the .csv process (opening splash screen, menus, etc)
- Auto ROM generation based on up-to-the-day lineups and stats through Yahoo Sports API - this is a big one and won't be ready for a while.
We'd love any feedback or suggestions. Cheers!
Me and a few buddies have been obsessing over R.B.I. Baseball 3 for the better part of the last year, and a few months ago decided that we should update it with a 2013 roster.
Instead of hand-bombing all of the modifications into a hex editor, we started to build an interface to import a .csv file of batters, pitchers, team uniform colours, etc to the ROM file. We started the project in Python and quickly realized that we could run it on a webserver and make it available to anyone. Check it out:
http://www.rbi3.ca
While some amazing RBI 3 hacks have come out already, our key feature is the ability for anyone to (fairly) easily create their own fully customized ROM. Kind of like what nightwulf did with RBI 1.
We don't host ROMs on the site (maybe we're being extra cautious? not sure...) so here's the process:
1. Acquire R.B.I. Baseball 3 ROM from wherever you can find it (it's about 192kB)
2. Download a .csv template from http://www.rbi3.ca/create.html
3. Edit the .csv to change lineups, batting stats, pitching stats, uniform colours, error percentages, and the "base year" of the ROM (default is 13).
--- Tip #1: Save the .csv as an Excel format while you're working on balancing stats (so that equations work), then re-save as .csv when done.
--- Tip #2: If you use the default .csv provided, you'll create a fairly-well-balanced end-of-2013 ROM file.
4. Upload the original ROM file and the .csv file to the site and receive back a patched ROM.
Our project is open-source and hosted on Google Code. That's where we have our Issue Tracker of things to do and things to fix, our Wiki where we've documented key hex addresses, some key references who helped us out, and more.
If anyone is interested in working on this with us (or creating a spinoff project), we made some notes on how to set up our dev environment and you can grab the code from here. My CompSci buddy Chet made some good design decisions early on with the Python script - everything is class-based and once you figure those out, it's pretty simple to hack in new features. (my style of programming would have been one long, nasty, linear script!)
Our todo list is looking like this:
- Cosmetic tweaks - I don't know anything about changing graphics yet.
- More back-end validation of .csv-supplied data; providing better error feedback to users.
- Enabling modification of other text strings through the .csv process (opening splash screen, menus, etc)
- Auto ROM generation based on up-to-the-day lineups and stats through Yahoo Sports API - this is a big one and won't be ready for a while.
We'd love any feedback or suggestions. Cheers!