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Alright, been plugging away at a couple rather large projects for some time, and needed a palette cleanser. Been a while since I've played around with the 30-team 94 ROM and man, it is so much easier to work with. So we have a fun opportunity to dive into the history. Presenting: Unlike other World Championships [which technically the Olympics doubled as up until 1968] there was no way of pretending that this could have been a contemporary release. However, last year was the centennial of that first Olympic hockey tournament... Suppose if last year wasn't such a mess, I'd have remembered to "release" this one then. Original Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace logo over interior shot of the Palais de Glace d'Anvers [Ice Palace of Antwerp] where all games were played. 7th Olympic games [Summer, there were no winter games yet] Dutch/French postcard fills in the splash screen nicely. Old and New Red Ensign vs 48 Star banner and ice markings. William Abraham Hewitt [yes, the father of Foster] was the honorary team manager of the gold medal winning Canadian representative Winnipeg Falcons team, but while there he still managed to fulfill his roll as sports editor, whose columns were printed in such papers as the Toronto Star and Winnipeg Tribune. This is also the first tournament for the Czecho-Slovaks since they unified the regions around the old country of Bohemia. Old and New Interestingly enough, at the time, the only markings on the unpainted ice were the blue lines and center ice dot. The referee at the time was just a guy in a suit. Occasionally in those early days, games were even officiated by the managers or coaches of other teams. Old and New While there was no painted crease in those days, it helped to scuff up the goaltender area. Also, the old box frame built net. Old and New Brought back the period correct "Zamboni" as well. In lieu of an ad, settled on an '20 style art deco clock. Had tried to rig the seven participants into a staggered playoff format. Annoyingly, despite how much I nerfed some unplayable teams to effectively create a "bye round" scenario, there was still a 25% chance that the horribly unskilled placeholder team would manage to get credit with a win anyway. So to spite the AI, having NPC teams play themselves to guarantee the bye was the way to go. Removed previous versions as they were broken and sucked. Olympic Hockey - 1920 Antwerp [1.3].bin

Given how long this community has been modding, I'm not sure how useful this will be to most people, but as a spreadsheet nerd, I did find this to be helpful to me. The point of this tool is that while pasting in player card photos and entering corresponding names into NOSE, I would note the offset in Tile Molester and also paste the names into the matching PLAYER NAME field. Then using some fancy formulas, it all gets crunched into the first column, which can be copy/pasted into the PlayerCardsDefault.txt file that EARE uses. I've tested this on a couple of ROMs and it seems to do the job quite nicely in complimenting EARE's Player Picture setting function while also helping me keep track of the rosters, while giving me a quick reference to go to a specific player pic in the case when I wanted to edit or swap it out. As an aside, one interesting thing I encountered was that the PlayerCardsDefault.txt file needed to be edited and saved before I opened EARE. Not sure if it was real or imagined, but it seemed as if for quick indexing, the program would reference the .txt file in the state it was as the program was opened. Anyway, once I kept that in mind, I had no further problems. A visual reference: Note the Offset of the player photo as you are importing images. Paste Player Names into the cells that correspond to the Picture Offset [as opposed to the Card Pointer] Once all names have been entered, select and copy ALL of Column A and paste it into the PlayerCardsDefault.txt file as found in your EARE.exe folder. [I keep a copy of the original unedited file just in case] Open EARE, and click Set Player Pictures. Repeat as players may be traded, to redirect to player's new roster spot to the old photo spot. Of note, I even found this worked for multiple instances of the same player, so in the case of an All-Star team or, in my case, having a player selectable and a non-selectable version of the same team [for playoff alignment purposes] both instances of the same named player would end up referencing the Last reference of player name/photo pointer on the list. Sorry if this is too redundant, I've been told it's important to skew your instruction to all skill levels. Anyway, hope this is helpful. NHL94 Cards Hex.ods NHL94 Cards Hex.xls

Top notch work as always. I've never had any luck with the referee window either. I was editing one pixel at a time to try and take out the yellow kickplate and ended up giving up.

Full disclosure, I did run into some annoying problems trying to fix the ref in the other images. The tiling for these guys are a bit jumbled up with other code so I was just as likely to glitch the entire window as I was to black out the stripes, so I opted to leave it alone. On another note, I was thought it would be cool to clear the bench as most teams only had the six skaters. [Teams still used the rover in these Olympics, but recoding the game to allow for the extra attacker and goalie to be on the ice at the same time, that's a bit of an ask] This too was kyboshed by the fact that when the bench players move, they share sprites with their on-ice counterparts. Well, that's one solved at least.