Cricket excitements

Reworking my mid-80s Cricket Simulation

Originally started in the early 80s on an Apple IIe running CP/M and then MS-DOS using Visual Basic for DOS and Btrieve file manager. This in itself was an evolution of a card based simulation that Roger Good and I devised, based on Sid Sackson's baseball and tennis games in A Gamut of Games.

At its zenith in late 80s it was capable of automatically playing matches with detailed scorecards containing everything you see now on CricInfo (detailed stats, runs, minutes, balls, ball-by-ball commentary etc)

It has languished since then, but this is an attempt to restore it and at least play a few more matches, since there have been no comparable commercial offerings in the 30 years since then. There are some capable stats based simulations, but none that let you create your own teams, or none that I can find anyway!

The first step was to restore the original data using some forensic tools to decode BTRIEVE files.

Screen Shots of original MS-DOS version, in all its 132*43 VGA text glory.

Output of PDF generated from restored data exhumed from the BTRIEVE database files.

Christopher Taylor-Davies

May 2020

Christopher Taylor-Davies @CTD