Many people have been frustrated with the default text speed to start the APBA hockey game. Usually, one has to keep hitting the “[“ key to try and slow the game down while the first few shifts zip by. This problem mainly stems from the fact that the code runs faster on new machines, remember, the original game was written in the days of 80286 and 80386 processors and the speeds were set for those machines. But now in the days of 3+ GHz quad core machines, the speed has become way too fast.

I had tricks to avoid the text speed problem. One I usually used was to save a game running at a speed I had set using the “[“ and “]” keys during the last 20 seconds of play. Then, to play a new game, I would use the “7” option to load the old game, let it play out, pass through the post game stuff without saving anything or viewing stats, THEN starting a new game, which would then run at the speed that I wanted. This was very cumbersome, but did stop me from missing out on the first 4 minutes or so of the game while I frantically hit the “[“ key to slow things down. Often, by the time I had the speed to down to a reasonable level, I was already losing 1-0. So, this weekend, while it was snowing heavily (procrastinating shoveling), I wrote a patch to drop the default text speed down to something reasonable. I am running a 2.6 GHz dual core Intel machine, and I got the text speed very readable at the current patch setting. I plan, in the near future, to upgrade the utility to allow users to change the default setting to a speed of their choosing. Right now, it just slows things down to what is a reasonable speed on my machine. But it will be a good start for you all for now. Stay tuned here on apbahockey.com for the upgrade in the coming week or two.

Before you run the patch, please back up your hockey.exe file. The patch writes directly to that file, so if something goes wrong, you can always resort to your backup of it. You are warned, and I take no responsibility if you don't back it up and destroy your only hockey.exe copy. I have tested it a dozen times with no problems, but you never know. Also, be aware that you need to run the utility in the same directory as your hockey.exe file....I didn't put a choose the directory dialog box in. Also, this only works with version 4.02. It will change bytes in other versions in weird ways, and likely destroy the file and make it unusable. Hope everyone finds this useful. If so, post a note to motivate me to upgrade the patch to allow speed customization rather than just slow down.