Editors and Utilities for APBA Games

12/21/09 I have received a number of e-mails over the past several months asking me if I am going to update my utilities for 64 bit Vista, Win7, BBW 6.0, etc. The answer at this point is "I don't know.". A little background - my programs were written in Visual Basic 3.0, which produces 16 bit programs. 16 bit programs will run on Microsoft's 32 bit operating systems. They will not run natively on 64 bit Microsoft operating systems, not because of any inherent technical limitations, but because Microsoft made a conscious decision to not allow their 64 bit systems to support 16 bit code. Thus my programs can be installed on Vista32, Win7-32, etc., but not natively on Vista64 or Win7-64. The same is true for Baseball for Windows. Both BBW and my programs can be installed on 64 bit operating systems by installing a virtual 32 bit operating system within the 64 bit operating system. So if you can install BBW, you can install my programs. If you can't install BBW, then you probably don't need my programs.

That said, however, most of the utilities have been converted to 32 bit already, they just haven't been tested. (Some additional work is required to accommodate the directory restrictions imposed by Vista. And I haven't worked with virtual machines or Win7 at all yet, and I would like to have the installation program accommodate these as well.) When I was about to begin extensive testing, I first wondered if I should try to get ahead of the curve and rewrite them in VB.Net. I discarded that idea. Then I decided that I should combine all the various utilities into one large program that had options to do what the individual utilities do. I was about halfway through that effort, when the real world intervened. I won't go into the details, but because of the workload at my day job all of my hobby time disappeared.

A further factor in the decision is BBW 6.0. At first BBW6 was going to be an upgrade of BBW5.5. I expected a few tweaks would be necessary to accommodate changes to file layouts, etc. Recently, however, APBA has announced that they have had to do a complete re-write of BBW. Since BBW was originally an 8 bit DOS program, the program and file formats were constrained by both the limitations of DOS memory and 8 bit addressing. Some of that was alleviated with maintenance versions of BBW written in 16 bit and 32 bit. The following is speculation on my part, but I expect the file formats to be very different for the rewritten game. If the BBW rewrite were my project, I would completely redo the file formats to streamline them to support the new game and 64 bit operating systems. (That is not to imply that the new game will not be compatible with old season disks; you can easily do both.) I will almost certainly purchase BBW 6.0 when it is released. So the decision to update my programs to work with BBW 6.0 would seem to rest on two decision points: One, will I like BBW6 enough to make it my game of choice instead of BBW5.5 (likely); and Two, will I be willing to tackle the work involved to decipher the new file formats (not so likely). Number two may be a moot point. Miller Associates raised no objection to my deciphering their file formats to write the utilities. The new APBA management may or may not raise such an objection.

So the decision to upgrade my programs is in limbo, probably at least until the release of BBW 6.0.

06/05/07 Skeetersoft's Merlin program has had a bug fix to correct the situation where the program attempted to print Ballpark error messages to the report file, but the user had not selected the report file to be printed. The program now knows to skip the printing step if the report is not being printed. You can download the update by clicking on the disk icon Just extract the two files from the zip file and put them in the directory in which you have installed Merlin.

06/05/07 For the Vista Install issue with COMMDLG.DLL and the following installs (Baseball Bundle, Baseball Utilities Bundle, Merlin), there are alternate setup programs. Try the regular install programs. If they fail because of not being able to copy COMMDLG.DLL, then try the alternate setup programs. They're in this zip file

. Note that this zip file does not contain the full installation bundles. It contains replacements for 'setup.exe' for the bundles. And for some reason Vista does not display the icons for Advanced Draft, League Manager, Stat Master and Wizard for Windows. Also in the zip file are Vista-compatible desktop icons for these programs.

04/20/07 Update to installing under Vista: Do not install my programs into C:\Program Files\... if you have User Access Control (UAC) turned on. UAC aggressively protects C:\Program Files\ and my programs will not be able to write to their parameter (options) files.

04/15/07 This weekend I acquired a new laptop with Windows Vista on it. I installed Baseball for Windows and some MakoJo software on it. I thought I would document my installation process in case in might help someone who is experiencing difficulty with this. Some of the steps were not intuitive and the Vista Help files were not very helpful. But thanks to some nice folks who posted on the Internet about how to work with (or around) Vista, I was able to get the software installed. You can read about it here. Note that there is still an issue with COMMDLG.DLL. There is a complicated workaround (which most people would not want to try). I am working an easier solution.

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