CCHL: Thoughts on the SIMON simulator...(Part One)

We're almost a season and a half into using the Simon Simulation software for the CCHL, after sixteen years of using the old dinosaur known as APBA. APBA served us well, but support for it was limited to the user community, which could be hit and miss. As the years went by and operating systems routinely updated and rendered older version ineffective in some cases.

This is the first of three blogposts where I'll review how we got here and what I feel the pros and cons are of Simon.

The CCHL began play in the Fall of 2002, which was about a year after Windows debuted its XP operating system. Things worked swell for a while, and the Vista operating system was rolled out to the public in January of 2007, which only a few of us ever used. Then the troubles came. Windows rolled out "Windows 7" in the Fall of 2009. Three years later in the Fall of 2012 "Windows 8" was released and then in the Summer of 2015, "Windows 10" sprung to life.

With each new version, APBA struggled more and more to keep up. DOS-based, it made for a time-consuming exercise to convert the text-based reports it generated. (IF you had the 3rd party report program.) In the last few years of us using APBA, more and more GM's complained it wouldn't run on their computers anymore. Random lineup errors would occur that were only discoverable after the games for a given day had been simmed. Over the 2016/17 and 2017/18 seasons with APBA more and more GM's had resorted to sending in their lines manually, which nobody liked doing.

As most of you remember, we decided to find an alternate quality software to switch to and in 2018, we chose Simon.

That's the backstory...in the second and third parts of this blogpost, I'll discuss some of the pros and cons I see with Simon...