Technical Difficulties in SOM

by Thomas Fischer
July 31, 2005

This may be of some interest to many SOM gamers that have had the following experience with the CDROM version. During a regular season game or even more commonly during a playoff game once you have finished the game you get an error message that says something about having two players with the same first initial and last name, cannot continue and the game scrams automatically. You are left with a badgame.sav file in your cdrombb folder but when you restore the game with this file and finish it you get the same mistake, error message and end result.

As commissioner of four Strat baseball leagues I have too often seen this problem occur. In my experience and the experience of the owners I play against I believe this problem occurs most often in post season play. The only thing I can say is that it is some type of programming error in the game.

There are possibly more solutions to fixing this problem than I am aware of but the two solutions I will relate to you should help fix the problem if it occurs during a game. I got the first idea from sending strat one of my badgame.sav files and explaining the problem. I emailed a message and attached the file with it. They sent me a reply a few days later telling me that they had no problem with the file after they downloaded it and restored it on another computer. According to them it worked just fine and the game results were sent back to me in the reply they sent me.

This gave me the idea that the next time that the error happened to me I would first send the .sav file to a league mate and see if they could restore and re-send the file to me. By golly if it didn't work too. This is perhaps the simplest solution to the problem. It has happened that this solution has worked more often then not.

When it has not worked my only other solution is to restore the .sav file, print the box score, the score sheet (on same page as box score), and the play account (PAC). This gives you a comprehensive way of manually inputting every play in the game to recreate it just as it actually happened when it was played. Once finished inputting the entire game, including the final out, the game should work properly and output the files needed by the league.

Now I should mention at this point that the second of these solutions, namely the manual recreation of the game, should like the first solution be tasked on a different computer than was used for the original game. This is another that I have learned from trial and error. When the problem has happened to me on my own computer I was unable to correct it by manually recreating the game. Instead I had to send the files and information to a colleague who manually did the recreation for me and sent back the files.

These are the only two ways that I know of to fix this problem but as I said in the beginning there are possibly additional methods to solve the same problem. I hope this has been informative and useful to mention this problem. I have played strat for over twenty years, although I have only played online for about the past three years. In the past three years this is perhaps the most prevalent technical issue I have come across.

Having experienced this problem multiple times over the course of several seasons, especially in the playoffs, I've come to the conclusion that when setting up a playoff league, you should create a new league rather than using Strat-O-Matic's Create Playoff League function. Setting up a new league instead of using the SOM function will produce much better results and resolve one of the many headaches that league commissioners get over the course of a long season.