Devlin

Thank you very much! Here's a tiny update, as a Rickey Henderson portrait was requested (mid90s.lgd). update1.zip I optimized one portrait for Oakland, the other one (free agents) is better suited for all the other teams he played for (especially for dark uniform colors). Added portraits for Vladdy Jr. and Dewayne Wise (update.lgd) Added audio for: Miguel Cabrera and Jorge Posada (update.lgd). However, the pronunciation of names of Spanish origin is not the greatest strength of the linked AI. The portrait creation video is ready, by the way. Anyone who really wants to give it a try is welcome to contact me. ☺️

Thank you so much for the coffee! 😉 And let's not forget the 2005 White Sox. All credit to jwuk99 for them! It's more noticeable during gameplay. It's a bit distracting. But I probably also look at it much more critically. 😄

By the way, that's the A.I. Al Michels I used. If someone wants a specific name in the game ... 😉 Unfortunately, you never know how it will ultimately sound ingame. Finally got a good Posada: Posada.wav

Yes! 🙃 Thanks!

Thank you so much! Finally a good Jeter for you in the game. If this turns out to be my last love letter to the game, I think it's a good one. But then ... there is still that damn 1920s mod ... 😁 Merry Christmas to you too!

Thanks guys! I have an update for you. The 2005 White Sox were requested. I just thought they'd be terribly lonely. So I rolled up my sleeves and set about transferring previously unreleased portraits of players from the late 1990s/early 2000s into the mid90s mod. Many portraits were from my early days = poor quality. Thanks to AI, I was able to quickly rework several, and I recreated others from scratch. All in all, around 100 new portraits were added. 🤪 Some players received their long-deserved ones ... Some were years away from being in the original game ... ... and others just received a nice update ... ... while others heard their names echoing through the stadiums for the first time: Chipper.wav Jeter.wav You heard right! I added lots of audio. While any combination of names that existed in the original game poses no problem (Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz and so on), things get tricky when it comes to introducing new audio into the game (Pujols for example). On the one hand, AI makes many things possible, but the game has its flaws. Unfortunately, a very lossy compression method was used for the audio files. This results in poor sound quality and likely explains why most of the newly added sound files are plagued by glitches. It is also very likely that I am not using the exact same compression. In short: Some sound great ... Berkman.wav ... others terrible ... Guerrero.wav Varitek.wav Most have a noticeable distortion. Therefore, I added a roster where the worst-sounding names were removed. Furthermore, I wrote a short guide on how to easily modify sound (and portraits) so you can easily get rid of anyone that's more annoying than pleasant to hear for you. If any DOS-Sound-Geek is reading this and is familiar with ADPCM formats, I would greatly appreciate advice and help. ☺️ Last but not least: I don't have a roster for those years in question. My recommendation is to combine the players with the existing one (1995) rather than focusing on a specific year. Otherwise, you'll have to live with many missing portraits. Oh, and I almost forgot: I slightly modified the original patch with the 162-game schedule so that you can choose any year between 1985 and 2005 for your season. Enjoy! update mid 90s mod.zip

I really appreciate it🤗, but it's not necessary for this amount of work. It's just about manageable. Especially now that I'm enjoying it again, and particularly when I know someone is genuinely happy about it. But if you really want to buy me a coffee, I'll return the favor and make the whole 2005 team. ☺️ Several have contacted me about this, but in each case, they were only briefly enthusiastic about their childhood game and then disappeared forever. That's why I'm hesitant to invest a lot of effort. Writing a tutorial would take an insane amount of time, and given the steep learning curve (at least for those unfamiliar with this type of image editing, and that seemed to be the norm), it is unfortunately unlikely to bear fruit. The only feasible option seems to be a video, and as a very private person (and as someone who never speaks English), I feel extremely uncomfortable with that. I did make a video before, but without sound and for someone somewhat familiar with the process – so that video isn't really helpful in many ways. However, I have a completely different feeling about you, as you're showing genuine passion. 😃 That's the best prerequisite. Therefore, my suggestion is: I make a new video (with sound/detailed explanations) for you and share it privately. With a little perseverance, I see no reason why you couldn't learn it quickly. To get the pictures into the game (hex editing) is much easier in comparison, even if it may seem extremely complicated at first. Anyone else who's interested is welcome to contact me. I won't share the video with strangers who only send me a meager sentence. I want to at least feel that there's genuine interest. 👍 Please keep in mind: it's unfortunately very time-consuming and even complicated, if programs like Photoshop, GIMP, or Asperite are new to you. Please ask yourself first if you're truly prepared to invest the time and energy required. If the answer is indeed yes, I will be happy to help. 🙂 Question: Can you ever have enough Big Hurt?

I had some time this week. I have some good news and some bad news regarding the expansion to 30 teams. The good news: The 30 teams schedule used in Hardball 6 seems to be fully compatible with HB5 and it’s easy to add. The bad news: I can’t expand the league to 30 teams without a crash. I had to change some data to add 2 teams. An error can always creep in during that process (doing it manually), but I think the reason lies elsewhere. That's beyond my capabilities/too time-consuming to figure out. Perhaps one day freem will resume work on his already fantastic tool. I'm sure he'll be able to tackle it. Since I couldn't make any progress here, I focused on what I can do: And of course, the best player of them all (😜) *I haven't added them to the game yet, therefore the red caps and missing backgrounds.

Great to hear from you! I am fine. How are you? I nearly contacted you after the Yankees lost the ALDS, but I didn't want it to come across the wrong way. But now I have a crumb of comfort. The 1908 Old Time Baseball mod is finished. OTB08.ZIP However, the tiny hitting timing window is frustrating. You’ll collect K’s and it basically eliminates bunting and hit and run, too. 🙄

Yes, but based on low res photos. Nothing else was available back then. But most of the portraits in this file are a bit of low quality. I could only replace existing portraits at that time. The quality improved significantly years later, when I figured out how to add portraits regardless of their size. I also had to remove portraits of players who retired, due to these limitations. If I remember correctly, Jeter and Halladay were among them. Konerko too, by the way. I was so bored by the swinging for the fences and striking out stuff, I barely watched any games the last few years. I mean lots of the players don’t even have two-strike approaches nowadays. That's the first thing a hitting coach should focus on. I don’t get it. By May at the latest, it was obvious that this Jays team was different. I was hoping for a Brewers Jays World Series, just so other teams would realize that contact and fundamentals matter. Let’s hope it shifts a bit. This season was a blast for me to watch. ☺️ I hope your White Sox climb out of the cellar soon. I always wanted to mod Old Comiskey Park into HB5. I wish I could get my hands on a stadium editor. Unfortunately, the stadiums consist of countless small images, making it nearly impossible to create something new with only a hex-editor as your main weapon. If you enjoy it this much, I can offer to make 5 players of your choice for you. Maybe some more. We’ll see. All I can say is that interest and enthusiasm have a positive effect on my motivation. It's nice to create something that others enjoy.☺️ Thank you, but no chance on my part. I started in 2012. It took me 4 or 5 years to make the portraits for the 2015 mod. By the time I am finished, half the players are retired. 🤪On top of that, I hardly play anymore. Funnily enough, the last game I played was the first perfect game I ever witnessed in HB5. Unfortunately, I was on the wrong side of it. Al Michaels wrapped it up as usual, by the way. My motivation isn’t the same as before, my free time even more limited. If HB5 were just a little bit more realistic (more stats based, walks!, more strikeouts, CPU less dependent on the homerun to score), I would still play it to death. Someday AI might be able to tweak it just a little bit. 😬 But I love the art style so much, that I still enjoy making a portrait now and then.

It's a small world. I was in contact with him a long time ago and used one of his rosters for the 2015 mod. I extended the mlbpa-league to 30 teams in the 1920s mod to showcase it ... just in case someone asks about it. Create a new mlbpa.lgd and add 2 teams. Unfortunately, a new schedule would indeed have to be written for 30 teams, which is a huge undertaking without a tool. In this case, I would probably honor my Jays for their incredible run and add a few portraits. I was already tempted to make at least Ernie Clement. And a smiling Vladdy ... 😊Oh and Bo and Varsho and Gausman and Yesavage ... Scherzer! Who is doing the other 700 portraits? 😄 You're welcome 😊

I forgot one thing worth mentioning: the pink color pixel in the first row is used for transparency in the portrait-files (to show the background pictures). The stadium images also use transparency sometimes and likely the same color was used. Hope this helps.

Yes, when I set the league up there were only 12 teams and no Browns and I wanted to have as many good players of the era present as possible. So they ended up all over the place. In the end, only a handful of us play it and anyone who has a better solution can upload it. For my part, I'm just happy and thankful that the remaining four teams are finally filled and it doesn't bother me the least for now. I'm still interested in creating portraits for this roster and if I get around to it I'd make some changes anyway. I have the feeling, that our new friend freem might motivate me to spend some time on it again … So yeah, if you don't mind, I'd say upload it. 🙂 Iconic player. Good choice! This is nothing short of incredible! I'm really excited to witness your progress. That’s the pain of working with different color palettes. Each stadium (each screen in fact) has its own. That's why Toronto's SkyDome can shine in rich blue, while the Polo Grounds presents itself in beautiful green. The respective color palette of a stadium is located right at the beginning of it’s data: All I did with Fenway was simply to copy the palette of Sportsman’s Park and paste it into Fenways’. Thanks to DosBox you can get hold of the palette of a respective screen (stadium, menus etc.) simply by taking a screenshot (CTRL-F5) of it and open it’s color table. This saved me a lot! Aside from it, there are still some colors you can’t use: The selected lines in the image above are reserved for the primary and secondary uniform colors of each team and therefore often change from team to team. These lines need to be blocked, whenever editing the stadium images. There might be some more colors (probably only in the first and last lines of these palettes), that could cause trouble, but I am not sure about it.

Thank you, I appreciate it. For some years I used to have the habit of making 1-2 portraits after work to relieve stress. I found it very relaxing at the time. So there is a lot of practice involved. If you really want to get into it, it's probably best if I write a tutorial (using Photoshop), but that will take me some time. Is there a player whose portrait you would particularly like to see? Otherwise, I'll look for someone who doesn't have one yet to illustrate the process. It’s nothing fancy. Actually pretty easy, once you get hold of it, but a bit time consuming, if you pay attention to the details. The minute you start painting with pixels is the moment the clock starts running faster and you end up wondering where the hell the time has gone. Good score! I haven’t had the time to play a single game since we last wrote. 😒 My 1908 mod for OTB is also still unfinished, but an end is in sight. 👍 By the way, did you finish the 1920s roster for HB5?

Well, Christmas came early this year! I had to pinch myself to make sure it was real. 😃 I wouldn't have thought it possible for someone to pull something like that out of a hat. I am very impressed. To take it that far … Wow! Thanks for sharing! It's so great to see that there are still people out there who care about this game. Just try one by one. But I don't know if I can be of much help to you since you're obviously in a different league. Importing images would be a huge time saver and would make it easier for others to add portraits without having to bother with a hex-editor. So far I was able to exclude the bin-file containing the portraits from the HB5CDROM.bin by simply renaming it’s entry in the hb5.exe (where it’s called pics.bin). Renamed it port.bin and saved the respective data under this name in the games directory. Thankfully it worked. This enabled me to add to the file (instead of just replacing existing images or mess everything else up). Now only 4 values need to be changed when adding a new image. It’s size & position, the new number of all portraits & the new size of the whole file. Considering your skill set, it suddenly seems in the realm of possibility to tackle this one. 🫣

You can create portraits in any good image editor, but you need a hex-editor to get them into the game. At least until someone more skilled than me comes along and writes a tool that makes life easier. But I wouldn't hope for that. Are you familiar with editing 256 color images (and hex-editing)?

Those fastballs with an exclamation mark are very hard to hit, if you’re not ready for it. If the pitcher has one of those, I always look for it, but do recognize most of the times, if it’s something else. Sometimes I am way early on a changeup, but that’s the name of the game. With the strike zone enabled, I rarely strike out. Definitely some more, if it’s off, but mostly because I am at least trying to work the count and it’s something the game unfortunately wasn’t made for. If a pitcher has a sinker and a changeup it gives me the most trouble. Both pitches look almost identical, but are thrown at different speeds. You could give a pitcher a 95 plus fastball only and try to time it in practice mode. There is also an option named "pitch to center" or something like that, so you can concentrate on timing only. McDermott's ERA is way too low, by the way. Just checked his ratings: Nothing that stands out except his 96 rated fastball and the 64 against left-handed hitters. So he should have success against them, but struggle a bit against right-handers. It’s obviously not working. I simmed a season and his ERA was much too low again. 2.79 against lefties and 1.06 (!) against righties. 😕 I never simmed a season, to fine-tune those ratings and it seems that those in the Legends League generate more pitcher-friendly results (compared to the default 1995 League). How about that? With some of those ratings that you can change in the player editor, I'm not even sure if they work at all or are just there to pretend more depth. Like "home" or "clutch". Others however, like "streak", seem to work very well.

Then I misunderstood. I have to admit that the Box Score surprised me and made me a little nervous. I very rarely get results like this. Normally it's more those 4-3, 4-6 scores with 8-12 hits for both teams. Of course it also depends on the difficulty settings. But the reason I got nervous was because one of the last things I worked on was changing game play values. One resulted in up to 10-12 Ks against the CPU per game and at least 3 hit batters. 😉 Anyway, I just wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally put this in circulation.

A little update to the 1950s season: - 20 new portraits - minor changes to lineups - a more classic looking Fenway stadium If you haven’t started a season yet, simply replace the port.bin, the 1950s.lgd and the hardball.bin (to change Fenway Park) in your 1950s game folder. If you already started a season, please read the instructions in the zip file first and do not replace the 1950s.lgd! Have a nice weekend! 😊 1950s Update.zip

The moment I read that batters were hit, I thought I had uploaded an hb5.exe by mistake that I changed a bit, to get rid of the pinpoint command. But that does not seem to be the case. I tested the exe-file I uploaded. Works fine for me. Anybody else having that problem? How many batters were hit? In exhibition games, sometimes the scores seem to be rather high. Within a season it’s much more balanced. Do you have pitching crosshair for both teams enabled? I have it on, only to identify borderline pitches better and get at least a few walks per game. It needs some getting used to, hitting without it. Especially against a pitcher with a 99 rated fastball like Lefty Grove. Pitches rated that high are very hard to hit with success in this game. And about that 7-run inning: Did you change pitchers without warming them up?

Thanks for the tip! I tried Baseball Mogul but ultimately ended up with Out of the Park. I checked the pitchers and their arsenals in it and the pitches given to them are the same as in the Neyer/James book I have. Haven’t created a player since playing OotP, but if I ever return to it, this will save a lot of time! The batting splits in the deadball era I run were balanced, however. But it’s all in baseball reference.

Thank you, that's very kind of you! I feel the same way. For me the game is also childhood and youth. Every time I work on it, I recapture some of the magic I felt back then. I also have many unfinished stuff ... I still have 2k14 installed just to play with the mid-90s Knicks every now and then. Well, I am working since 2012 on this Hardball thing. 😆

I never heard of it before. Found it on ebay. Looks gorgeous! I use the “Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers”. There are also mainly the more well-known ones in there. It’s German. Well, I am an avid reader and a writer. That probably helps me out a bit (google translate doesn't hurt either). I still can recite most of Poe’s “Raven”, “Annabel Lee” and Keats “Ode to a nightingale” in English. But this doesn't get you very far these days. Alas! Must have been a crazy amount of work. I still have my MVP disc, but unfortunately I never really found a datafile that worked for me. I win far too many games on the highest difficulty. It’s one of the reasons I always returned to HB5. The last time I played a season it was with my 1995 Jays. I started the season 10-18. And I enjoyed it. Well, I got a bit frustrated by the end … 😄 Thanks! Well, you can’t have your eyes everywhere. It’s in the past. But there was a point in time, where I actually played with the idea to open a thread. If only things had gone a little more smoothly with the 2k mod … I told her. At first she was confused and then laughed at the fact that she was mentioned in a US baseball forum. She said: "Gern geschehen." It's propably best translated with: My pleasure! Back to the game: I just replaced the color palette of Fenway Park with the one of Sportsman’s Park, to give the former a bit of a vintage look. Just copy & paste. This worked much better than I had hoped. Here’s a comparison:

Great! If there are no portrait requests, I would turn my attention to this one. You don't need to send it to me first. I’m just happy someone other than me finished it! 😀 For a release it’s always better to have accurate rosters for one year or those playing it wonder why it’s seems to be such a mess. Some of it also had practical reasons. Like making sure, that good photos of the new players were available, as I planned to create portraits for all of them. And I figured out very late in my HB5 modding carrer how to expand the league to 16 teams. That’s why Willie Kamm played for the Indians. I simply had no White Sox back then but wanted the player to be included. I also kept the original 1924 Senators because I was happy about every portrait I don't had to create. And it’s a damn good team I’d like to face too. Only one question comes to my mind: What source did you use to decide on which pitches pitchers throw? It’s very easy to share. I’ll write a little instruction and upload it later this week along with the new portraits. It does not affect a season already under way. At least not if you don’t mind importing 10 players manually. Well, that’s not easy to answer. Various factors came together. The main reason simply is that I'm a notoriously shy person and feel very, very uncomfortable writing in forums and stuff like that (especially in another language). I am an introvert. That was the main hurdle all the way. Still is, to be honest. I am also always very busy and try to keep everything else to a minimum. And then some contributing factors: It’s unfinished and I originally really did not want to release it in this state. Ask ballfour about his 98 MVP mod. It’s probably the same. It has been a very long process. Sometimes I touched it not for a whole year only to make 30 portraits at once and abandon it for some months or another year. I never worked towards a release. I always worked on a part that was enjoyable for me. I also was in contact with the guy who made the modern day rosters. I uploaded everything I had made to this point to dropbox and sent him the link, but he never reached back out. So I thought that if he’s not showing any enthusiasm about it, nobody will. You very rarely see anybody mentioning this game at all and I honestly thought radio silence was the answer I would get if I opened a thread about it. You made portraits for such an old game? Congratulations for wasting your time! I made the last big progress during the Corona lockdown, but it was also the time I discovered Out of the Park Baseball. I stayed with it and HB5 stayed unfinished. And finally, for some years I really did not want to contribute anything to this very forum. I made a mod for 2k12. During a short vacation I tried to figure out Blender and spent countless hours on the first few faces, uploaded them finally and a couple days later another user uploaded some models of it in a mod of his own without any credit at all. Considered the time I spent on it, I was pretty upset. The years after it, I did not want to contribute anything here, because of it, to be honest. I’m over it. It’s forgotten. But it was a factor back then. And just to make it clear: 2k12 wasn’t my cup of tea. Sold it a long time ago and haven’t made anything else for it. But if I really had wanted it, it would always have been possible to upload the mods elsewhere. So it probably comes down to me avoiding to post in a foreign language forum. It’s way out of my comfort zone. It needed my wife in the end to convince me. After I told her, that you mentioned the game favorably and that it could be a good way to finally find out if somebody is interested in my mods for it, but that I was not sure bla, bla, she was the one pushing me to let the cat out of the bag. I would be so lost without her. 😁 Long story short: I’m just a very shy guy with a wonderful wife who worked very long on a very old game only very few people still enjoy.