Hardball 5 modded

[Devlin]

A long time ago … me and my reliable hex-editor found a way to mod the 1995 game Hardball 5. Some of you were kind enough to express some interest, so here we go!

 

What I have:

 

From the golden age of baseball:

 

- An unfinished roster with players (and many new portraits) from the late 1920s/early 30s. 4 teams still need to be done from scratch. Some of the portraits are rather ugly, because I had no clue back then, how to get the uniforms to look like the other ones of the Legends League and I was restricted to the file size limitations of the original portraits that I could only replace at the time. It took me a while to figure it all out. It's also crazy how much has changed in terms of the availability of high-resolution photos. When I started in 2012, it was much harder to get good ones of players from the first half of the last century.

 

Most of the NY Giants players (like Mel Ott and Bill Terry) have their names called by Al Michaels. If I remember correctly, some of the Pirates players too. I made a terrible Lloyd Waner and don’t remember if I ever fixed him. Now I am too afraid to listen in.

 

 

 

-  One roster with players mainly from the early 1950s. Rather complete, but 6 teams have very few or zero player portraits and I kept most of the 1960 Pirates players. The NY Giants were once again provided with sound. Nothing better than to hear Al Michaels announce Monte Irvin!

 

The Legends League was extended to 16 teams (instead of only 12).

 

 

I wrote a 154 game schedule and it works, but unfortunately the World Series will not be triggered at season’s end. No matter what I tried, I could not get it to work. So you can play a full season and win (or lose) a Pennant, but that’s about it. You also can’t reset a season or start a shorter one. I had to overwrite those. Always keep a copy of both rosters to start a new season! 

 

Don’t be surprised, if you meet the Giants in an interleague series. Without a World Series in sight, they did not want to play against the same teams over and over again and John McGraw himself was eager to defeat Babe Ruth once more — all by himself of course. 😂

 

 

And last but not least: I reskined Tiger Stadium (with exception of the pitchers view) and changed the colorful modern crowd with the one seen at 1927 Yankee Stadium. I renamed Seals Stadium to Crosley Field. I intended to mod it, but Tiger Stadium was a nightmare to do and I successfully avoided going through this experience again. But at least I got rid of the TV-ad in right field.

 

Modern baseball:

 

- One roster with players from the mid to late 1980s. I just replaced some of the players from the default roster. Maybe 4 per team.  Originally I wanted to add a lot more, but never found the time to do so.

 

 

- The default mid 90s roster with many portrait enhancements. That’s the only one you can start right out of the gate with. I added players from the HB4 players-disk (along with the sound files). In the end I mixed 1993-1996, so don’t expect a 1994 roster (for example), albeit I changed the date of the season to 1994. There were so many players that begged for a starting job, I had to get a little creative. One important thing: All the logos (with exception of the Blue Jays) were done by someone else. I probably downloaded it from simcentral. So many thanks to those who created them!

 

 

- A complete roster with players from 2012-2017. This was mainly done by a nice guy named bigjim28 at tecmobowl.org. All credit for the roster goes to him! He made nearly all the players and logos (?) and I originally wanted to publish this roster with the portraits I made, but I always had too much to do and never got it into a final version. I tried to keep it updated for a while and created nothing but chaos. On top of that, I pretty much lost interest in modern baseball. I hadn't looked at this roster in years. However, I was now not only surprised how many portraits I made back then, I was stunned.

 

 

Unfortunately, many of them don't look as good as they could be because I didn't know how to add portraits back then and (as I wrote earlier) was tied to the small sizes of the originals. Now I know how to add portraits of any size, by the way.  It is as annoying as it is beautiful in its complexity. But once you get the hang of it, it’s really easy to do.

 

This last roster is probably not too hard to fix. When I find some time, I'll clean up my Blue Jays a bit. But unfortunately I don't have time to look for the rest. So you are on your own to make it work in a way that is enjoyable for you. 🙂

 

If anyone has the time and energy to work on these rosters and cleans up the mess I bring upon you, I would really appreciate it. I haven't done much with it in years and probably won't spend much more time on it. That's why I'm releasing all of it now and in this unfinished state. It’s probably now or never. If there's some interest in it, I might be motivated to contribute more portraits, but unfortunately good ones take time and I usually don't have much of it.

 

Enough said. Now I'll get everything ready for upload. It might take me a little bit. Those who are interested in all rosters listed above can install HB5 to four separate folders in the meantime. Make sure that the Hb5cdrom.bin is on a local drive (not CD or iso) and that the game is accessing it. You’ll respectively need to replace this bin file with the one I’ll upload. I only use HB5 patched to 1.12. The so called Enhanced Edition (1.13) got rid of the classic stadiums and I didn't notice any improvements to the game play, to be honest. I could be wrong. But all of my uploads will require HB5 1.12. Since I have to upload the main files (classic stadiums & executables included), it might also work with 1.13. Not sure about it.

[Yankee4Life]

Oh my God!  😲

[laroquece]

Man, I´m shaking right now. 

[Dirtdog]

OMG!

This is my roots, the first PC baseball game i ever played. This then 6

 

Let me see more, please

[Yankee4Life]

1 hour ago, Dirtdog said:

OMG!

This is my roots, the first PC baseball game i ever played. This then 6

 

Let me see more, please

 

I'm close to it but a few preceded this game.

 

Hardball 3

Tony Larussa 2

Hardball 4

Tony Larussa 3

Oldtime Baseball

Hardball 5

 

I still play all of these games via DOSBOX and I love them.

[Devlin]

22 hours ago, Yankee4Life said:

Oh my God!  😲

 

☺️

 

20 hours ago, laroquece said:

Man, I´m shaking right now. 

 

I hope you're feeling better now.

 

18 hours ago, Dirtdog said:

OMG!

This is my roots, the first PC baseball game i ever played. This then 6

 

Let me see more, please

 

Mine too and the reason I became a fan of the game. 😊

 

More?

 

How about him?

 

 

Or him?

 

 

Or ...?

 

 

Or how about if I just upload the mods right now? 😁

[Devlin]

Have fun with it!

 

HB5 Mods.zip

 

I hope everything works.🙏

 

[laroquece]

59 minutes ago, Devlin said:

I hope you're feeling better now.

 

😁

[Yankee4Life]

The good, the bad and the ugly:

 

First the good. Devlin was kind enough to upload these mods for us and by the look of those screen shots this is going to be a wonderful mod to play.

 

The bad: I have DOSBOX and I have no idea how to to get this to work and I have read and re-read the directions.

 

The ugly: I get so frustrated with myself when I can't follow computer instructions and the reason why is that I know it is user error and do not know how to fix it. If anyone knows how and has played one of these mods kindly let me know how you did it. Thank you.

 

[Devlin]

First of all: I'm sorry to hear that you had trouble with the installation. What's worse is that I'm the reason for it. But first things first:

 

The ugly: I'm neither used to writing nor speaking English. 😳 I don't have any problems understanding it, but of course expressing yourself in a language is much different than understanding it. I'm very rusty. You'll have to bear with me.

 

The bad: Well, my bad. I just saw that I uploaded the installation guide as an office document. It should have been a pdf-file. I work all day with office and it was the force of habit.

 

The good: I'll write a step by step instruction how to get it to run and I’m sure we will get it to work. 👍

[Yankee4Life]

Thank you and it is much appreciated. The first problem I had was when you had me type INSTALL from your directions. There is no file that says install. Then it went downhill for me.

[Devlin]

  

56 minutes ago, Yankee4Life said:

The first problem I had was when you had me type INSTALL from your directions. There is no file that says install.

I meant that you should install the main game. I can’t upload the whole game as Hardball 1 & 2 just recently popped up on steam. It seems it’s no longer "Abandonware".

 

But we are now approaching the matter step by step. 😉

 

Install HB5! 😉 You already have it installed? Great! You can use this installation. Now check your version. Start the game, enter Setup in the main menu and take a look at the version number.

 

 

5.12 is the last version with the Legends League and the classic stadiums. You will need this version for the 1920s and 1950s rosters to work. The other two mods work with every version.

 

My old disc is already patched to 5.12. It probably doesn't even matter which number is listed there as long as it's not 5.13, since my mods contain a modified .exe and also the hardball.bin, which is changed during patching.

But just in case, here is the patch:

 

HB512.ZIP

 

Let’s start creating the folders that we need. For this example I make a games folder on my c drive.

 

C:\games\HB5

 

Now create 4 subfolders within the HB5 folder:

 

HB1929

HB1951

HB1995

HB2015

 

Now copy the game files of your already installed HB5 (the game files, not the folder!) into the HB1929 folder. It should look similar to this:

 

 

As you can see, I underlined one important file. Make sure, this one is in the games main folder. In the mods I uploaded, I put it in a separate folder, because I thought in the beginning that you’ll need to define a cd-rom drive in dosbox, but actually you’ll just need to copy the HB5cdrom.bin into the games directory. Sometimes it’s so easy … Use the HB5cdrom.bin that you already have for the 1995 and 2015 mods and the ones I uploaded for the other two. Do not copy the folder I uploaded, just the file within it.

 

Now test the game. Open dosbox and type in the following:

 

Mount c c:\games\HB5\HB1929

C:\

HB5

It should look like this:

Start the game. If it’s not working, replace the INSTVARS.BIN with this one:

 

INSTVARS.BIN

 

It contains the installation path. In our case, it’s simply: c:\

Try again. The game should start now.

 

Now it’s time to copy the first files from the mods I uploaded into your game folder. Open the “Late 1920s” folder and copy these 4 files to your game folder:

 

 

Overwrite the hb5.exe and the hardball.bin. Then open the HB5CDROM-folder and copy the HB5cdrom.bin to your games folder as well.

Start dosbox, type in the same as before and you should time travel into one of baseball’s best times as soon as you change the league and choose the 1929.lgd. Notify me, if it's not looking like this:

 

 

Repeat these steps for the other roster-mods. In the mid80s-90s & 2012-2017 folders are two different exe-files. If you have the Hardball 5 Enhanced Edition (5.13) installed, use the exe file from the 5.13 folder. If it’s 5.12, use the other one.

To start the games, always mount the game folder as C:\

 

To stick with the examples I outlined above, it’s:

Mount c c:\games\HB5\HB1951

Mount c c:\games\HB5\HB1995

Mount c c:\games\HB5\HB2015

 

If it’s not working, remember to replace the INSTVARS.BIN

 

I haven’t installed something in dosbox in a long, long time. There might be easier and better ways, but this one should work.  

To make life easier, you can copy a dosbox.conf file into the respective game folder and put the commands I posted at the very end under [autoexec]. Here is one for the 1929 mod:

 

dosbox.conf

 

Now create a link of your dosbox.exe. Open its properties, go to the target path and add the following behind “… dosbox.exe”

 

 "-conf "C:\Games\HB5\HB1929\dosbox.conf"

 

Confirm the changes and start the game with the link.

If dosbox is installed under program files it should look like this:

 

"C:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74\DOSBox.exe" -conf "C:\Games\HB5\HB1929\dosbox.conf"

 

Edited August 10 by Devlin

[Yankee4Life]

My God I am getting close with his directions but I got to stop right now and take some Tylenol.

 

[Yankee4Life]

It has been twenty-eight years since I was using DOS commands on a daily basis. You see back then computer users would have to switch between DOS and Windows and I liked DOS much better.

 

Following Devlin's detailed and very helpful directions brought back some DOS memories and long story short I have all four versions working for me now. Thank you Devlin for this and your work on this. I was looking through some of the teams and they look outstanding.

[Yankee4Life]

I did come up with a question. How do you enable joystick sup[port in some games? Tony Larussa 3 and Oldtime baseball will not let me use one and I have DOSBOX for that.

[Devlin]

I'm very happy to hear that it works and that you like it. ☺️

 

I never had any issues with my controller in dosbox. You need to plug in your controller before starting dosbox. Maybe check your dosbox configuration file. If you use the one I uploaded, you’ll need to edit this one. If not, search for “dosbox-0.74-3.conf” (if this version is installed, of course). Mine is located in:

c:\Users\username\AppData\Local\DOSBox\

Open it with a text editor and search for joystick. It should look like this:

 

 

And maybe the dosbox manual can help:

https://www.dosbox.com/DOSBoxManual.html#Joystick

[Yankee4Life]

A couple of things really quick Devlin. First you do a great job writing and communicating in English so don't worry about that.

 

Secondly only in Larussa 3 and Oldtime baseball I have no joystick support. I can not figure it out. Hardball 5 does have it.

[Yankee4Life]

I got into the 1929 league and I edited one of the teams that were not completed, the 1929 Red Sox. Here is the finished product. It will take some time to look over the rest of the teams.

 

[Devlin]

On 8/12/2024 at 1:03 AM, Yankee4Life said:

First you do a great job writing and communicating in English so don't worry about that.

Thank you! After some posts I already feel a little bit more fluid again.

 

4 hours ago, Yankee4Life said:

I got into the 1929 league and I edited one of the teams that were not completed, the 1929 Red Sox. Here is the finished product. It will take some time to look over the rest of the teams.

 

 

Wow, that’s great! Thank you so much. And don't let the other lineups confuse you. I started with the intention of a 1927 roster, but fell in love with the 1932 Diamond Stars cards. I intended to recreate them and added more and more players of that time. In the end I wasn't too happy with the quality. Especially with the faces. Travis Jackson of the Giants is a remnant of it. Long story short: That’s why it became more of a roster of the best of that time span and I chose 1929 as a compromise. Same with the 1951 roster, by the way, but I needed to give them a date other than the default 1995.

 

I also have a little progress to report:

For the first time in years I made new portraits (all for the ’51 season) and really enjoyed it again. That’s the main reason why I made so many back then. It really relaxes me.  

 

So you are welcome to request portraits. 😃 With the very limited interest there is for it, I'm sure I won't be overwhelmed. 😁

 

[Yankee4Life]

Since you had this for the 1929 league I have been concentrating on the 1929 rosters for the teams you did not do. I first checked the rosters on Oldtime baseball and baseball reference. It's not bad to do and I finished up the 1929 White Sox.

 

[Simmons]

I made some quick and dirty icons for the mod versions if anyone uses shortcuts.

HB5 1929.ico HB5 1951.ico HB5 1995.ico HB5 2015.ico

[Yankee4Life]

34 minutes ago, Simmons said:

I made some quick and dirty icons for the mod versions if anyone uses shortcuts.

HB5 1929.ico 71.76 kB · 1 download HB5 1951.ico 71.76 kB · 0 downloads HB5 1995.ico 71.76 kB · 0 downloads HB5 2015.ico 71.76 kB · 0 downloads

 

Not bad. Thank you. I have some too that I may upload here when I am finished with the teams.

 

Next up the 1929 St. Louis Browns. That is for tomorrow.

 

Now Devlin I have a question. the only difference that I see from these four installs is the season you created. For example the 1929.LGD for the 1929 season. Everything else is the same. Can I have the 1929, 1950s, mid80s-mid90s, mid90s and 2015.LGD in the same directory under one install and just choose what I want?

[Yankee4Life]

Two things this morning. First, the completed 1929 St. Louis Browns roster.

 

 

Secondly George Sisler was on the original Browns roster in the game but in 1929 he played for the Boston Braves. So I traded him to the Braves to be accurate.

[Devlin]

21 hours ago, Yankee4Life said:

 

Not bad. Thank you. I have some too that I may upload here when I am finished with the teams.

 

Next up the 1929 St. Louis Browns. That is for tomorrow.

 

Now Devlin I have a question. the only difference that I see from these four installs is the season you created. For example the 1929.LGD for the 1929 season. Everything else is the same. Can I have the 1929, 1950s, mid80s-mid90s, mid90s and 2015.LGD in the same directory under one install and just choose what I want?

 

 

No, unfortunately that doesn't work. It would mess up the dates of the seasons, the structure of the legends league, the portraits and sound files. And maybe even more (that I am no longer aware of).  The files are not identical.

 

 

3 hours ago, Yankee4Life said:

Secondly George Sisler was on the original Browns roster in the game but in 1929 he played for the Boston Braves. So I traded him to the Braves to be accurate.

 

Yes, like I wrote earlier, I wasn’t looking for accurate 1929 rosters and Sisler was the face of the Browns.

 

Another example: In the ‘51 mod, I put Roy Sievers on the Senators roster, albeit he played 2 or 3 more years for the Browns after 1951. Haven’t checked it, but something like that. I believe he was rookie of the year late in the 1940s, but played mediocre after it for the Browns. I did it this way, simply because his main breakthrough and impact came while playing for Washington and the ratings I gave him reflect it.

 

But these rosters reflect my personal taste first and foremost and were not supposed to be released. I would have created them right away accurate for one specific year, if I had had a release in mind. 😅

Having said that, keep it going and do whatever you think is necessary! I highly appreciate it. 👍

Your feedback and passion are the main reasons I am motivated again to create more portraits and why I stayed awake a little longer last night to get these done:

 

[Yankee4Life]

1 hour ago, Devlin said:

No, unfortunately that doesn't work. It would mess up the dates of the seasons, the structure of the legends league, the portraits and sound files. And maybe even more (that I am no longer aware of).  The files are not identical.

 

 

No big deal. I can live with this setup.

 

1 hour ago, Devlin said:

Yes, like I wrote earlier, I wasn’t looking for accurate 1929 rosters and Sisler was the face of the Browns.

 

You are right about that. He is the all-time St. Louis Brown.

 

1 hour ago, Devlin said:

But these rosters reflect my personal taste first and foremost and were not supposed to be released. I would have created them right away accurate for one specific year, if I had had a release in mind. 😅

Having said that, keep it going and do whatever you think is necessary! I highly appreciate it. 👍

Your feedback and passion are the main reasons I am motivated again to create more portraits and why I stayed awake a little longer last night to get these done:

 

 

It is ok. If it is not all 1929 then that is fine. What I am going to do is when I finish I am going to mail you the new 1929.lgd and have you look at it before I let these guys have it. I am all done with the four teams you did not put players in. Now I am going to inspect my work in all of the sixteen team and then I will mail it to you.

 

How would we import these new portraits? They look great.

 

But now I have a question about you. I see you’ve been here since 2010. In the last few days you’ve made wonderful contributions in here. I want to thank you for this but if you wanted to you could have posted about your work earlier. There is a good number of classic gaming fans in here that even I am not aware of. I have been playing Larussa 2 for over thirty years.