BBW 5.75 to begin beta testing

Just before Christmas, APBA Company CEO John Herson made an announcement:  There is appreciable progress on APBA’s Baseball for Windows. Titled BBW 5.75, alpha testing has concluded and beta testing will commence in January. 

Here is Herson’s announcement:

“Alpha testing has wrapped up on BBW 5.75 – the update for BBW 5.5. The next step will be a round of beta testing to begin in January.
Advanced Draft, League Manager, Stat Master, and the game itself, BBWin32 are being updated to run natively under all versions, 32 and 64 bit, of Windows XP, Vista, and 7. All 4 of the BBW programs have been updated and are fully functional. Compatibility issues with 5.5 are minimal and will be handled with a stand-alone utility. The testers have successfully run full-season replays, drafts, checked stats, used AIM, created organizations, and much more. Some user interface features have been added – right-click menus, mouse wheel scrolling to name two. The primary focus on this update had to be on converting BBW 5.5 from a Windows 3.1 application, which is what it is at heart, to one that could run on Windows 7. This has been accomplished. You won’t need to run in compatibility mode, you won’t need to "run as administrator", you won’t need XP-Mode or virtual machines. It will run on Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. One of the braver testers has successfully run it on a Windows 8 preview version.

More work remains, more testing will be done, to insure a successful release.”

You can read Herson’s announcement and all the responses to it on the Between the Lines forum. Later in the thread, Herson did go into detail on what will be fixed and improved:

“Some fixes that will be in 5.75 include:

1) The 2^nd column 6 issue (along with 2 other similar ones).

2) Hitters will need to have a ‘1’ somewhere on their card for a PRN-6 to be changed to a homerun against L/M rated pitchers..

3) Positive Park Effects have been fixed. Testing will need to be done in the upcoming testing round.

Draft will have some new features:

1) Ability to view a player’s card.

2) Improved sorting by clicking on the header row.

3) A Filter feature for the main player’s list”

Beware, some are bit testy towards Herson in that forum thread right now.  There’s something about BBW that makes everyone’s engines run a little hot. Whether or not, it’s called for is your call (I’ll admit, I’m not much of a computer APBA player). 

No doubt, it’s good news though any way you look at it.  I understand the concerns of everyone there (I think, remember I’m not a computer APBA player).  The idea of an improved product on the table is a good idea.  More importantly, it gets people talking about the product (and I know Herson pays attention to what APBA fans are saying on these various forums).