MLB Crack: Batting Cleanup - Final Touches

[Hot Rod <hotrod.apple2@gmail.com>]

On Thursday, October 18, 2012 6:56:07 PM UTC-5, Hot Rod wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm going to be adding a series of posts here describing my most recent retro computing project - a crack of the Micro League Baseball Box Score/Stat Compiler disk.
> 
> 
> 
> ]HR

Batting Cleanup

Some final touches were needed to wrap things up.  The other Black Bag MLB cracks all have a catalog track, and a VTOC that allow free space for files.  I put a catalog track in place, but I opted to mark all the sectors as used.  I didn’t think the need for squeezing free space out of disks was quite what it once was, and mixing other files onto full disk copy programs didn’t seem wise.  Besides, the point of having been able to accomplish that with the cracks had already been made.

What will be posted to Asimov will be the final MLB Box Score/Stat disk crack, .nib images for the other programs, a ‘scratch’ disk that contains portions of the program and the crude tools I used to extract the data, and a raw 16-sector image of the converted 10-sector data.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to crack the MLB stuff.  I think a more straightforward way would have been to just leave everything in its original 10-sector layout, and patch in the new RWTS code, leaving as much of the original program intact as possible.  But as I mentioned earlier, it would require creating a whole new crack ‘set’ to allow them to work with each other.  

Another interesting alternative would be to create a 4+4 copy utility.  Since the original code contains both the read and write routines, and they’re fairly straightforward to use, one could create a set of tools to create and/or copy the native 4+4 encoded disks.  That might be an interesting project.  (Or just extract the 4+4 disk routines and build a whole DOS around it.)

The actual programs aren’t all that large though, so yet another alternative would be to just create file-based versions.  Most of the direct disk access concerns the teams, and those all have a fixed structure to them.  I think one could convert the whole series (Game, GM/Owner, Box Score, Teams) to a blended set of programs to play the game and manage the teams (i.e., the Box Score disk only adds the See/Print stats function; Play and Delete already existed).  If not that, then the Game, GM, Box Score programs probably could fit all on one disk, with all the teams on other disks.

The ’83 Teams disk I previously uploaded had a lost track $19, sector $0A, which I now know landed right in the data for the ’83 Houston Astros.  It could be reconstructed with some effort, or replaced with another team.

I also noticed that there are more teams on the Box Score disk that don’t appear, because they’re marked with a ‘00’ (which is the ‘deleted’ state).  They might be salvageable.

To make other Teams disks work with these cracks, all that is needed is for the teams data to land on the same track/sectors (as listed previously).

Thanks again to Magnusfalkirk for providing the .nib images, and sucking me into this project.  Back in the day, this would have been a day or two effort.  Now it takes a little longer…  :)

Whew, this was a long set of posts. Sorry about that.  I just had all these notes on hand, so thought I'd share to at least archive them.

Hats off if you read it all.

]HR