Not only is it nerdy, but it also shows my advancing age. Last night I discovered and was summarily fascinated by this page, which at first glance is just a bunch of guys who play RBI Baseball, the greatest NES game of all time, a lot but also has some interesting CS-related stuff that kept me awake much too late last night reading it. For instance:

The instruction manual for the game graded each player in terms of their speed, contact hitting, and power hitting, on a letter grade scale from A-E, but it was pretty clear even when I was 8 that Vince Coleman was faster than Ozzie Smith, even though both were rated A for speed. Sure enough, someone monitored the values loaded into memory on an emulator and each player has a unique numerical value for speed between 78 (all the pitchers and Tony Armas) and 148 (Vince Coleman).

Ditto for power hitting, which is actually stored in a 2-byte field that has a decimal value between around 700 and around 900. These seem like strange numbers, but someone apparently hacked their ROM to give a player the maximum power value of 65280 and it caused a flyball to go so far they had to reset their game because it never hit the ground. Apparently the game designers used some sort of formula that calculated trajectory and velocity based on this number being in that specific range.

But by far the most interesting thing to me had to do with pinch hitters. I've had a theory ever since I was a kid that pinch hitters hit an inordinately large number of home runs considering their crappy stats and power rating. Thanks to this site, I have confirmed that I'm not nuts. Apparently the first time a pinch hitter comes to the plate, the game loads a power figure that is 64 higher than their actual figure, which explains why it's so easy to hit pinch homers but not as easy if they stay in the game. This was verified once again by monitoring the values loaded from the emulated cartridge during gameplay. So cool.

In freshman year, the guys on my floor and I used to play RBI a lot and I invariably beat them all handily. It's about time to awaken the beast again. I challenege anyone who reads this page to a game of RBI baseball. If you win in a reasonable matchup (i.e. no all-star teams, no Houston vs. Detroit) you get all the glory of your name up in lights on this webpage and possibly a better prize I haven't thought of yet.