⚾ Baller

Modding tools for Backyard Sports, with support for:

• Backyard Baseball 1997/2001
• Backyard Soccer
• Backyard Football
• Backyard Basketball

This project also hosts a decompilation of Backyard Baseball 2001.

Tutorial

Let's extract Backyard Baseball 2001's scripts, modify one of them, and rebuild the game.

Before you start of course, download the latest release. Open a terminal and run baller --help to make sure it works.

1. Pick some directories to keep your project in. This tutorial uses:

   • ~/bb2001src as the project directory, for the extracted source files.
   • ~/bb2001game as the output directory, for the compiled game you can run.

2. Copy your original game files to ~/bb2001game. Make sure to include all the original data files: baseball 2001.he0, baseball 2001.(a), etc.

   Before you start, you could try running the game from this directory with ScummVM to make sure your untouched files are working.

3. Extract the assets to your project directory:

   baller extract ~/bb2001game/baseball\ 2001.he0 ~/bb2001src

   This will write project.txt, some supporting files, and one directory per room.

4. Modify a script. The file baseball/RMDA/LSC2_0013.s contains the hover text for the main lobby. Change line 105 from "Meet the players" to "Meet the modders".

5. Build the assets. This will overwrite baseball 2001.he0 and other files in the output directory.

   baller build ~/bb2001src/project.txt ~/bb2001game/baseball\ 2001.he0

Now when you run the game, it will use your changed text:

Talkies

Modifying talkies is similar. Briefly:

baller talkie extract ~/bb2001game/baseball\ 2001.he2 ~/bb2001talkies
baller talkie build ~/bb2001talkies/talkies.txt ~/bb2001game/baseball\ 2001.he2

Contributing

Install prerequisites:

• Zig 0.13.0

Run the app:

zig build run

Run the tests:

zig build test