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bcrt2000

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Everything posted by bcrt2000

  1. Just want to say that I’ve been extremely busy recently. Going to circle back around to this project in a few weeks.
  2. I love the authenticity of the newer games, but I really feel like the game should have a clear choice-- Arcade mode (which plays like 94), and Simulation mode (which plays like the modern games). Feel like the game would gain a wider & younger audience if they had an ability to play in "arcade mode", but not just relegate you to playing 3on3, but any proper game mode in "arcade mode".
  3. I do have a work in progress rink-graphics importer, that should allow you to not just import Centre Ices, but also board ads & ice ads (both at centre ice & behind the nets), and this is pretty much the biggest piece of the puzzle before I can complete the NHL 95 32-team swap mod, but also felt like I was spending a little too much time on it compared to my engine remake, so I'm putting it on pause for now so that I can get back to coding the engine remake I've been working on. I also was just really busy with work the last few weeks so haven't really worked on much of anything, Want to get my feet wet on working on the game engine again, and then maybe in 2-3 weeks I'll circle back around to the rink graphics importer when I have time.
  4. I went down this same path a few months ago. Some folks on the discord pointed me to the partial dasm project by MarkyJester, which actually is able to compile a bit perfect version of NHL94. There still needs to be a lot done to separate the sound effects, music, tiles, player/teams db from game code, and then catalog the game code. Not to be discouraging, I felt like this effort would probably take me 5000-10000 hours to do, whereas doing a from scratch engine remake of the game in Unity would probably closer to 1000-2000 hours of effort for me. That being said, I do think as a community it makes a lot of sense to do a dasm project of the original ROM, and if the community is successful, that could become the basis of any future rom edits, and add a lot more flexibility to what features could be added to the game (fighting, season mode) Its available here: I haven't fully settled on what it is yet-- at worst its going to be a best of both worlds hybrid of NHL 94 Genesis, and NHL 95 PC (+ fighting from 93). At best its going to be customizable and you can choose what you want from each version (and for the game to work in widescreen, I may need to do a new rink & a different rink-to-player ratio). But I think the menus are just more intuitive from the console versions, so currently the working version's menu is based of NHL 94, and I think the Genesis version feels better to play, so while I do want the difficulty of scoring to be harder (maybe via a difficulty slider), I do want the game to play like the Genesis version. But I'm just settling on calling it an engine remake of NHL 94 to keep it simple for now
  5. Final release of v0.4 for https://github.com/abdulahmad/EA-NHL-Tools Release notes: 95 Team Swap Mod added (WIP), included prototype jerseys for NSH, CBJ, WPG, MIN, SEA, VGK, All-Star Teams Documentation on expanding NHL95 PC to 32 teams added First release of PAL-To-ACT First release of QFS-To-BMP (all images extracted with correct palettes) First release of Roster-Generator Split out SPIT-To-BMP from PPV-To-BMP Documentation on Centre Ice logos in TIL-To-BMP Added palette support to SPIT-To-BMP
  6. OK will try to add all the progress I've made since last post. Finished the QFS-To-BMP converter (available on my Github). It will extract almost all the image assets from the game with correct palettes automatically applied. Just need to look into one issue with the CTLogos. Started on an NHL95 Team Swap mod. Super WIP at this point. This won't expand the game to 32 teams in the traditional way like the Genesis ROM hacks have, but it will give you the ability to start the game with 26 of the 32 NHL Teams plus 2 of the 4. Just for simplicity sake the way it will probably work is that the UI will allow you to select 6 or 7 out of the 8 teams in each division to be able to play the game with. Will let you play a playoffs with the 16 teams you want to or a season with the 26 teams you want to. So far I'm quickly prototyping jersey designs in photoshop, created a shader of sorts in Photoshop based on how EA shaded sprites originally in NHL 95 so that I can just work with flat colours and apply the shading on top. Here's an example of how it works with Minnesota plus some prototype designs for other teams: I have also created a document which explains what parts of the .EXE have to be modified to expand the game from 26 to 32 teams. Not a priority for me but a starting point for anyone else. Created a document which explains how Centre Ices work and how to modify them. Documents the .TIL, .MAP and even some locations in the .EXE where this is all configured and how it all works. This may eventually turn into a Centre Ice exporter/importer (especially as I continue on the Team Swap mod, I'd probably want to have a tool). One thing I figured out after running the completed QFS-To-BMP tools is that the palettes used to create the team palettes in HOMEPALS/AWAYPALS.bin are actually stored in the HOMEPAL3/AWAYPAL3.QFS files. Here's how some of the sprites look like with it applied: Here's a comparison between the palette which was extracted via my PAL-To-ACT tools (left) versus the palettes from the QFS (right) Also added two more videos to my NHL 95 hacking series on youtube which go over how palettes work in the game, and what my workflow looks like when working with paletted sprites. And the second video goes over the Centre Ice format The next thing for me to work on is figuring out how to pull NHL 23 ratings + official '22-23 stats and put them in a format that I can both use for my engine remake, and the team swap mod.
  7. It’s a PC game, requires something like Dosbox (I’d recommend something modern like Dosbox-X which doesn’t hav screen tearing issues). Also I don’t think the files here are the whole game, just the ones you need for the upgrade.
  8. FYI, I’ve documented the centre ice format on my EA-NHL-Tools GitHub repo. I knew about the tile data format back in the day but now I know how the .map works and how to change the team specific layouts by hex editing the .exe, and how to make much bigger centre ices. I haven’t tested the limits but I think there’s a potential to do custom graphics across the whole rink. Documentation is here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/abdulahmad/EA-NHL-Tools/main/TIL-To-BMP/README.md if this link breaks in the future, the info will probably still live in the EA-NHL-Tools repo, but in a different location because I probably decided to rename the folder it lives in. Note the Palette tools which are also in this repository can help with the palette for the centre ice logos (read the readme in the PAL-To-ACT folder, you can extract the palette for the .til file from HOMEPALS using the binToAct script).
  9. Finished the PAL-to-ACT tool to extract team palettes from the game so you can apply them to extracted sprites. It's available in the 0.4 WIP version. I need to update the QFS extractor so it is able to apply the correct palettes to all images extracted from the game (whereas gfxpak by default will only correctly apply a palette if the palette exists in the same QFS file) before I make 0.4 final. I may create a tool to reverse the process for 0.5 as I'm thinking about creating a team swap mod so that you'd be able to play with all 32 teams in NHL 95 PC-- albeit only 28 teams at a time in the game, and a script that you'd run at startup to choose which teams you want in the game. But at least you'd be able to play a playoffs with all of the teams you like, as well as a regular season with the 26 teams you'd like in that season. And the reason I'd want to reverse the process is that it's much easier to see how well your jersey is going to translate across all sprites if you can do it in Photoshop rather than in JED. Example of extracted palette applied to extracted sprites.
  10. I currently don't have time to dive any deeper, but I did spend some time today doing some diving in and writing some documentation on how NHL95 for PC could be expanded to 32 teams: https://github.com/abdulahmad/EA-NHL-Tools/tree/main/HOCKEY32 Most of the file formats are hacked that would need to be updated. I think the only one that isn't is the "Ron Barr" voice (which is not actually Ron Barr in NHL95 PC anymore). I've actually got close to figuring out the format, but the audio does come out a little garbled. As you can see, the hardest part would be modifying the HOCKEY.EXE file to add the additional teams to the team lists. I've given as much of a starting point as I can to anyone who wants to take a crack at it. I would definitely start with trying to decompile/recompile HOCKEY.EXE. Once that's possible, trying to add the team to the exhibition selection and getting into a game would probably be the next thing I attempt.
  11. Just FYI-- I figured out the file format of the rink announcer audio (and likely the Ron Barr VIV file is in the same format but haven't had time to check). I looked at the raw data from XBRUCE.VIV (unpacked it via sndutil) and it looked exactly like an .IFF file with the header chopped off. Added a header from another IFF file and my IFF-to-WAV tool (link to it is in the thread I posted) worked to extract it. The sample rate is either 5500 or 6000, have to compare to the game to make sure what is the right v alue. Here is one of the audio clips I extracted: zero.wav
  12. Hey all, I've created 3 new tools for NHL95 PC to extract in-game sprites, music & sounds. The sprite extractor leverages gfxpak to get the raw image data out of the PPV files before the sprites are converted to .raw (Photoshop RAW, not Camera RAW) and .bmp format. Note that the music & sound extractors are WIP and aren't perfect. Also note that these are all written in js so they should be very easy to modify & or reverse engineer for importing. Grab them here: https://github.com/abdulahmad/EA-NHL-Tools (each tool has it's own README with more info on it) Here's a sample of some of the extracted sprites: I've also created a few videos where I walk through how I figured out these file formats. It was originally intended for a fellow modder, but I feel like anyone who wants to know more about file format hacking can learn something. Here is a playlist of them: Just an FYI-- I used to be someone who modded the EA NHL PC games starting with NHL 95 and then NHL 98 all the way to NHL 06. If I recall correctly I was the first one who released modded rinks (under the pseudo name Chris and the group RTM but then later with my own name) and also figured out the Centre Ice file format. I have been sad to see threads from 2012-13 with people trying to figure out how mod NHL 95, so I figure I should publish as much as this info as possible. I am working on an Engine remake of NHL 94/95 in Unity so this is why I have been spending so much time hacking. I intend to make more tools soon-- the next one I'm looking to do is around palettes & extracting palettes from NHL 95 PC, and perhaps even 94 Genesis/SNES and have them in a format that can be applied to the extracted sprites and/or potentially even the ability to extract all the sprites with a specified palette. I also have started to create a document with information on all the file formats in NHL 95. I figure I will post that information in this thread as I spend more time on it, and also add it to EA NHL Tools github above.
  13. Well-- I showed you the steps I'm using. Not sure how much more I can help here. But it works fine for me. There's some difference here between what I'm doing and what you're doing. Just curious, what version of windows are you running? Are you trying to run this under some sort of emulation or linux wrapper perhaps?
  14. You might want to try doing the steps on a faces.viv that you haven't tried importing into already?
  15. What version of NHLInfo are you using? I've attached the palette, try it. face.pal
  16. 1. copy faces.viv into your NHLInfo folder 2. open faces.viv in NHLInfo 3. go to bottom of list and open facepal.fsh 4. hit S on !pal to save face palette. Name the file face.pal (.pal is important so NHLInfo automatically picks it up) 5. Use backspace key a few times until you are back to the NHLInfo folder 6. Press Shift+P to open palette folder selection dialog, Type in . as folder ( . means current directory) 7. Go to a face in Faces.viv. Press P until you see it select face.pal in the top status bar in NHLInfo. Don't expect the face to have the correct palette in NHLINFO, it won't. But the png file you export will. 8. Now that correct palette is selected, press S to save file with correct palette. Name the file and hit OK. 9. Now you should have a png file in your NHLINFO folder which has the face with the correct palette I haven't tried importing a face in, but I imagine you'd need to Match the existing palette since all the faces use a universal palette.
  17. There's a more in-depth forum post coming down the road plus an updated tool set that does even more, but for now, here is v0.1 of the NHL95 PC sprite extractor https://github.com/abdulahmad/EA-NHL-Tools
  18. Was able to successfully create a tool which extracts all PPV files to SPIT using gfxpak and then converts all of the SPIT images to photoshop raw (not the same as camera raw), and bmp. However there seems to be a bug in the bmp code, so around 30% of the bmps don’t come out right. Trying to figure out what’s going on. I also want to incorporate palette support so that the statically coloured sprites/pixels are coloured and you don’t have to manually apply the palettes.
  19. I've figured out a lot over the last few weeks including how to extract and import gameplay sprites. At some point (maybe this weekend) I'm going to write a detailed forum post with everything. I've been active on the Discord and been posting some details there on the #rom-hacking channel as I'm making discoveries. Here's a sample:
  20. @UltraMagnus One issue I noticed while playing 4 players-- the 4th player has a white star which is not distinguishable from the ice color. Are you able to change the star color to fix this?
  21. This was the best hockey game available prior to NHL92 IMO. Before this DOS version (released in 89), there was also a version of this game on Commodore 64 (released in 87). It didn't have the real players, but you could fully edit the rosters. I remember editing the rosters using our hockey card collection to derive player attributes, and then playing many many seasons with my brothers. There were other hockey games on the C64 but they weren't nearly as good, and the season mode really took this one over the top. So much so that we stopped playing Table Hockey after we started playing Faceoff. The DOS version looked, played and sounded better, but by the time we got a PC and Faceoff, it wasn't much longer until I knew someone who had NHL92 on the Genesis. After NHL92, I don't think I could go back to playing any other hockey games out at the time.
  22. The files are in some sort of 8000khz waveform format, but they end up being heavily clipped if you import them into something like audacity.
  23. bcrt2000

    editing 95 for PC?

    Sorry for the super necro bump, but was looking at this recently I’m pretty sure the animation sprites are in the .PPV files. I want to say there was a version of NHLInfo that could load some of the sprites, but either I’m imagining that, or that version has been lost to time. I’ve tried extracting the raw data from the .ppv files and putting it in TLP/TM but had no luck with any of the codec formats, which tells me the individual image files within the PPV file likely are also compressed.
  24. You should be able to save the palette? Save it as a .pal file. Just in case I would restart NHLINFO after that in case it doesn't recognize the palette file in real-time and needs to be restarted.
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