Football Director

[BBC 128K Fan]

Hello everyone

I was playing Football Director. I thought it was a pitty you can't change all the team names - until I saw a YouTube video where someone had. There was no explanation how it was done, but the Beeb version doesn't have a team name editor option like some of the other platforms.
Any clues how it can be done?
Thanks in advance

[sbadger]

Just eyeballed the disc contents on bbcmicro.co.uk

http://bbcmicro.co.uk/explore.php?id=1589

if you hit 'Display' on the TDATA file (then choose Text datatype), you can see they are all just stored plain text in there

Stewart

[BBC 128K Fan]

Thank you for your reply

I followed your instructions. The *.bin file can be viewed and ammended in Windows Note pad.

Once saved, do you use the BeebEm disc image options to copy the *.bin fine onto the image to replace the exisiting one?

New area for me doing this.

Thanks again for your support

[james]

If you use the Hex Dump format, it looks like each team name is padded to 14 9 characters with trailing spaces and then terminated with an &0D CR and the file may have some code from &C00 onward, if looking at the disassembly view.

Notepad, therefore, may not be the right tool for editing this file.

[james]

My coding skills are ... limited ... but I've cobbled together two BASIC programs and stuck them on a copy of the disc image downloaded from http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=1589

If you load the disc (but do not boot it!) and CHAIN"TPRINT", it'll print a list of all the teams in TDATA along with an index number. Example output:

teams.txt

(1.02 KiB) Downloaded 5 times

On the other hand, CHAIN"TEDIT" and you can change the team names. Type the team index number, it'll show you the current name and then ask for the new one. Simples. It goes like this:

Here are the rules:

• Teams are numbered between 1 and 86 inclusive
• New team names may be between 1 and 9 characters long
• If you enter a blank team name, the program does nothing and returns you to choosing a team number.
• Acceptable characters for a team name are A-Z, space and full stop.
• Press ESCAPE when you've finished making all your changes (else not all of the changed data will be written to the file)
• TDATA musn't be locked (*ACCESS TDATA) or editing will fail.
• There's a copy of the original TDATA saved as O.TDATA
• My BASIC is crummy. Unexpected things may happen.
• Don't press f0! It's my habitual SAVE program function key.
• It's fairly untested, beyond seeing new names at the start of the game:

  

FootballDirector.ssd

(200 KiB) Downloaded 2 times

[BBC 128K Fan]

Thank you very much for your amazing support

I will look into all of this in the next few days and let you know how it goes.

I really appreciate all the help I've had on this forum over the past few years - good little group here.

All the best folks

[BBC 128K Fan]

James...

Tried out your program. It's great and did the job. First class.

Many thanks for your support and easy-to-follow insturctions.

[james]

Thanks, glad it’s worked and hope you have fun with it!