How to view and hack player stats in Backyard Baseball '97

On a whim, I decided to try figuring out how the stats in the original Backyard Baseball work. And I succeeded. I then found out that people had already managed to locate the stats for Baseball 2003, but that was done via CheatEngine.

In contrast, I managed to find where the game actually stores them thanks to some tools by the ScummVM team. They're by no means good tools, but they were functional enough to get the job done. First, I opened the .HE1 file up with ScummEX, extracted each script one by one and decompiled then with Descumm. It took some time, but one of the last SCRP scripts in the second LFLF chunk had exactly what I was looking for.

Here's what it looks like when decompiled. It fills up a very large two-dimensional array. Clearly, these are the stats for all of the players. Thanks to the folks who uncovered the stats for Baseball 2003, it wasn't hard to determine what they mean and which players they correspond to. The first 30 arrays belong to the Backyard Kids. Their order is the exact same.

Plenty of these stats match up exactly with those for Baseball 2003, with the most frequent difference being adjustments to height. (Baseball '97 only has three different height levels, whereas Baseball 2003 has five.) But I found various other differences as well. For example, Jorge's bat power was given a serious buff, which is why he doesn't suck as much anymore. Conversely, Pablo was given a number of nerfs to make him less OP. He's no longer quite as fast and can no longer do any normal pitch properly other than the Heat.

The pros are obviously absent here, so next up are all the generic kids from Amy Bostwick to Zenon Estrada. It seems the generic kids after that were later additions. I didn't do a full comparison, but I believe their stats were left unchanged. Last up is Mr. Clanky, who is the same except for a difference in height and the fact that his appearance has a different ID.

Unfortunately, this script doesn't cover any of the stat changes that can occur under special circumstances, such as when Angela and Tony get buffs for competing with each other or when Kimmy gets a buff for playing on Eckman Acres. It's probably not as easy to identify whatever script does that. It doesn't look like the people responsible for Baseball 2003's stats covered that either.

Also, it seems that Mr. Clanky's infinite stamina isn't handled by his stats. Kenny also has 100 stamina, yet his can deplete.

With this knowledge, it's possible to edit the stats as well. First up, you need to open the .HE1 file in a hex editor and decrypt it by xoring it with 0x69. I wouldn't know how to do this with any other hex editor, but with XVI32, you can execute the script "BITXOR 69 73061054". Next up, head to address 0xB4A1B. That's where the script begins. You should find lots of bytes with many different values separated by 0x00 bytes. If you convert those from hexadecimal to decimal, you get the values found in the decompiled script. It's tedious, but if you can locate the array belonging to the character you're looking for, you can edit these values by entering the ones you want as hexadecimal values. Finally, xor the file with 0x69 again and save it.

For example, the first array corresponds to Kimmy Eckman:

I turned it into this:

I set most of her stats to 100. A notable exception was her bat contact stat, which I only set to 63 to match Pablo. This stat actually worsens your chance of getting a home run when it's too high. (It's probably for this reason that Achmed is a somewhat weaker batter than Pablo, despite having almost as much bat power.) Also, I could obviously only set her height to 3. The result of my edits was that she became even more OP than Pablo.

I'd assume other Backyard Sports games that run on the SCUMM engine handle stats similarly, so anyone with enough patience should be able to locate and edit those as well. But it would take plenty of work to figure out what the stats for the non-baseball games even mean.