Did anyone play these games (for the SNES) as a kid? (or maybe still once in a while when they were older?) Anyways, I fired it up the other day, and I started thinking about how the game actually works. For the uninformed, there are many teams, and many players on each team, each of whom has unique stats (speed, intelligence, agility, etc). Naturally, making the best team means picking the best players. (You can trade players between teams.) I thought that it'd be nice to dump the stats of all the players so they can be sorted/viewed/compared easily in excel, and set out to do it, but I was quickly stumped, because:
(1) The names of the players are not stored in a simple way. Doing relative searches for names in a hex editor yielded nothing. It must use some kind of multi-byte encoding.
(2) The stats aren't stored in a simple way. They're nominally between 0 and 100, but there's only multiples of 5. Thus, it's homo-morphic-whatever to a scale of 0 to 20, so maybe they're stored like that. Or maybe a non-multiple of 5 is actually possible; I don't know.
But even if I dumped all the stats, I don't know what each means. Some are obvious, like SPD (speed), but what does INT (intelligence) do for a player? Furthermore, if you go into the substitutions screen during a game, you see even more stats that you don't see on the trading screen. (The trading screen lists only SPD, INT, and AGI.) I can deduce what most of the acronyms mean, but some baffle me, like PCVR. (Cornerbacks and safeties have it. Maybe it means "P---- CoVeRage"?) Searching Google for football acronyms hasn't helped. To further confuse things, sometimes a statistic is just a clone of another, like INT and ACC (accuracy), and AGI and SCR (scramble) for quarterbacks, and INT and AWR (awareness) for linebackers. Yet for wide-receivers, INT seems to be unique, and not of clone of either BRTK or HND (break-tackle and hands).
Does anybody have some suggestions about how to do this? Has somebody already dumped the stats for these games?
(1) The names of the players are not stored in a simple way. Doing relative searches for names in a hex editor yielded nothing. It must use some kind of multi-byte encoding.
(2) The stats aren't stored in a simple way. They're nominally between 0 and 100, but there's only multiples of 5. Thus, it's homo-morphic-whatever to a scale of 0 to 20, so maybe they're stored like that. Or maybe a non-multiple of 5 is actually possible; I don't know.
But even if I dumped all the stats, I don't know what each means. Some are obvious, like SPD (speed), but what does INT (intelligence) do for a player? Furthermore, if you go into the substitutions screen during a game, you see even more stats that you don't see on the trading screen. (The trading screen lists only SPD, INT, and AGI.) I can deduce what most of the acronyms mean, but some baffle me, like PCVR. (Cornerbacks and safeties have it. Maybe it means "P---- CoVeRage"?) Searching Google for football acronyms hasn't helped. To further confuse things, sometimes a statistic is just a clone of another, like INT and ACC (accuracy), and AGI and SCR (scramble) for quarterbacks, and INT and AWR (awareness) for linebackers. Yet for wide-receivers, INT seems to be unique, and not of clone of either BRTK or HND (break-tackle and hands).
Does anybody have some suggestions about how to do this? Has somebody already dumped the stats for these games?