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Is 8 or more Player NHL 94 possible?


NHL94PC

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I remember playing 8 player Sega Virua Formula Racing, at an arcade years ago, for a birthday party. Everyone was sitting in his own car. What a blast that was!

Would something like this be possible with NHL94?

Ten or Twelve player would be perfect.  Could you imagine everybody controlling only their player?

Or at the very least, maybe 3 on 3  or  4 on 4?

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Eight Player would be virtually impossible to make outside of a Disassembly Hack, one would basically need to code in functionality for the menus to display new options for Five to Eight Player Mode, make it possible for players to have uniquely set indicators (it will be harder on the MD due to palette limitations), rework the Multitap liberties to use two Team Players at once, and assure that input optimizations are implemented to prevent lag frames or issues where button inputs are not being registered; for now, I'll keep it at the fact that we might not see it for a while, but I'm sure that Advanced level programmers that know the code of the series will be able to conjure up something eventually, it's only a matter of time before we get it.
As for Ten to Twelve Player gameplay, we will be out of luck on that for now: That would require the creation of a port of NHL '94, preferably the Sega CD version, to the Sega Saturn, as the Saturn granted us to have up to twelve players being able to play at once (only three Sports titles ever used the maximum player cap on the console) and would be the only (easy) way for us to get such a luxury working on actual hardware; Netplay, however, I would imagine would be a disaster for Twelve Player games, everybody would need to have a strong Internet connection and lag would probably be inevitable; fortunately though, the Saturn does have Online functionality, albeit weak by today's standards, but I'm sure that such a port would accommodate for that somehow, especially given that it is likely easier to work on a functional Online Mode than it was in 1996.

Edited by Royameadow
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That's very interesting.

Assuming if NHL 94 can ever be ported over to Saturn, would one of the Saturn Emulators for PC still have the 12 player gameplay?

Also, are there simple conversions of Sega-CD to Saturn?

Edited by NHL94PC
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To my knowledge of current emulators, both SSF and BizHawk (Version 02.00 and later) are the closest that we have at this time to utilizing the Multitap features in an optimal form, SSF is best to use for better emulation accuracy and BizHawk II uses Saturnus for easier input synchronization; both of them sadly do not have any known Netplay capabilities by normal means (yet), special builds of the emulator that can utilize Kaillera with such a high denomination of players would need to be made for such a liberty, especially given that most Desktop computers only have a maximum of six USB ports to plug in controllers and keyboards, which can get a bit crammed up very quickly.
As for porting MD and Sega CD titles to the Saturn, I honestly wouldn't be able to say much on that at the moment, especially due to the truth that I am still not fluent in how to code and have yet to have true understanding of how titles from those consoles were ported to the Saturn; considering that the Saturn does have most of the hardware that had come with the Genesis/Megadrive and both its add~ons, somebody with high knowledge of the hardware might be able to explain how to do this easier, but even then, the Saturn was said by many as hard to work with, this is ironically part of why we see more Megadrive and Sega CD Homebrew ported to the Dreamcast instead of its predecessor, Pier Solar and the upcoming Tanglewood are prime examples of where this has been notable in the past decade alone.

Edited by Royameadow
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