Welcome to MakoJo Software!  This site contains MakoJo's Editors, Viewers and Utilities for APBA Computer Sports Simulation Games, as well as an assortment of unique data disks, stadiums and assorted other game add-ons.   The Football programs are distributed with the APBA Football Game.  Almost everything on this site is free for the download.  The shareware items are clearly marked as such.  Disclaimer: This site is not affiliated with the APBA Game Company or Miller Associates (or anybody else!). Serving the APBA community since 1996.

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     What's New! 

12/21/11  Not to beat a dead horse, but I recently acquired a Windows 7 64 bit computer.  I expected to install BBW on it and provide a step by step list of what I did, similar to what I provided for installing BBW on a Vista computer.  However, there is almost nothing to tell.  I purchased a computer with Windows 7 Professional 64 bit, downloaded and installed Microsoft's free XPMode Virtual Machine, and installed BBW on the Virtual Machine just like on any other XP machine.  Installing the XPMode Virtual Machine was as straightforward as downloading one file from Microsoft's site and double clicking on it.  If you are going to get a Win7 64 bit computer, it seems to make sense to get a Win7 Professional box.  The XPMode machine has come in handy for a number of other things as well.

 09/20/2011  The Player Editor was not properly handling Innings Pitched for Pitchers, causing the Pitching Stats screen to crash.  That has been corrected.  You can download the corrected version here.

 07/08/11  Click here to read an open letter from John Herson, the CEO of APBA, regarding the 1960 and 1964 season card sets using the new "Just In Time" production approach.

 03/05/11  It was brought to my attention that .wdd2dos reverses the order of Leagues and Divisions when creating the dos version of the data disk.  This has been corrected.  The corrected program (ver. 2.1) can be download here.  Just unzip and replace the .exe and help files.


 12/10/10  A.I.M. Editor Introduced bugs fixed.  The corrected program (ver. 1.1.5) can be download here.  Just unzip and replace the .exe and help files.

11/12/10  Bill Staffa has requested that I no longer provide the Merlin program for download.  It has therefore been removed from the site.

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 those 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 (or APBA 1.0) when it is released.  So the decision to update my programs to work with BBW 6.0/APBA 1.0 would seem to rest on two decision points:  One, will I like BBW6/APBA1 enough to make it my game of choice instead of BBW5.5; 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/APBA1.0.


 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.

These programs are all full featured Windows programs and will work under Windows 3.1, Windows '95, Windows '98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.  If you are running a 64 bit version of any of these operating systems you will need to first install a 32 bit virtual machine and then install the programs to the virtual machine.  They feature point and click controls and have built in Help files.  You may have read about some of them in the APBA Journal.  The Football Programs were distributed by APBA on the Football for Windows CD.  The program "bundles" contain the programs as well as all of the other files needed to run the programs such as Help Files and .dll files (except for vbrun300.dll, see below).  The latest versions of programs are usually available separately for a short time after the update is released so that you don't have to download the whole bundle over and over again. vbrun300.dll  is required to run these programs but is not distributed with the programs because most people have it already.  If you need this file, click on it to download it. (225k)  Unzip vbrun300.zip and extract vbrun300.dll into your windows\system directory (folder).

It is okay to share these programs with your friends.  It is also okay to link to them from other sites.  But please link to the complete distribution bundles with all the included files, not just the latest .exe files.  You may want to consider, however, linking to the files here rather than reposting them so that your visitors always get the latest version.

All of the files have been zipped with PKZIP.  Just click on the icon or file name to download the zip file, unzip it, and then either run the included setup program (for bundles) or copy the new version of the files to the directory on your hard drive where the program currently resides.  If you need an unzipper program, you can download one from PKWare's Home Page, WinZip's Home Page, or InfoZip's Home Page.   A free, easy to use alternative is JustZipIt.
 

If you like to poke around in data files with a hex editor, then I recommend the MZap Hex Editor (11k).  I like it because it shows the file contents in hex and decimal and ascii all at the same time. This makes it easy to identify names, codes, stats, etc., all from one view.