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wboy

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Posts posted by wboy

  1. How 'bout: NHL 94 Editor? hehe, how original. :)  If there is a logo, maybe it should have NHL 94 somewhere on it, maybe a pic of a player or something.  I do like the puck logo.

    It supports all roms in the EA/NHL series so I don't want to brand it with any 94 only impression, even though I do understand its the unanimous favorite of the series.

  2. Well, as all you hex editing zombies (err... addicts) await the release of the editor I am working on, I thought I'd pick your brain and get some feedback on proposed, or even your own suggested names for it...

    The preview release was branded as "GenEAHE" - Genesis EA Hockey Editor.

    I've kind of grown old of this name before its official release (sad hey! :)), plus its a bit limited to future console rom support with "Gen" in the name.

    Of late, I've been thinking of calling it "Backcheck", with a slogan of the likes of - The Retro EA Hockey Editor for Genesis [& SegaCD - one day] [& possibly SNES - well, maybe one day, no promises]

    As I took a small break from coding, I had a go at an logo/icon. It's simple in look, but the genesis looking puck gets the retro console message across I feel regardless of the final name the editor could take on.

    This is where your comments, suggestions and ideas come in...

    Like of any of the already used/suggested names?

    Think you've got any better name idea's yourself... please post them...

    Hey, if your a keen graphic artist (err... Mack), feel free to design a logo/icon, or use the one attached and plaster your suggested name and slogan in a splash screen like design.

    I'll personally make the final decision on the name taken on, but credit will be given within the editor to anyone who suggests a name I may take on...

    Be creative!!!

    wboy

    PS. Evan, you may want to consider increasing the "Global Space Left", its getting very low.

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  3. ... Your latest find is really amazing

    ...I knew you would have to add the swapping of free bytes throughout the rom to make your editor worth-while

    ...Do you enjoy playing this game as much as you do editing it?

    ....Again, I just wanted to say that it's so cool to see that you're working on this project again.

    -Evan

    Well, its not really that amazing, just an idea to store free bytes between the end of the line data and before the player roster data. Considering there is team offsets that tracked where such data starts... I hoped you could store empty data inbetween without affecting the rom ... and todate it looks like it works without a glitch. While in theory you could do it yourself, you'd go nuts after completing one rom manually in the hex editor as there is a sh!t load of byte shifting and offset adjustments that need to be made. Just one of those job made easy with a computer...

    Hmmm, while the preview release was limited, i'd still take it over a hex editor any day! :P I'm sure many others would too agree... well the handful of those who received it! :)

    I don't play NHL94 much at all. I don't mind it but its not my personal favorite of the series. Plus I prefer playing against mates when I do, not the computer. At the moment though, I'm only play to test hacks.... as I'm enjoying the challenge of hacking the roms more at the moment...

    As for working on it, I never stopped... I've just had a bit more spare time of late to progress it....

  4. Ya, NHL 94 is on NHL 06 ONLY for the PS2 not the Xbox.  If you go to the PS2 review of NHL 06 I don't really care for what he says about NHL 94, what a moron.

    Huh, do you mean in the "Hands on" section where he says "It's hard to think that, at one point, we thought games like this looked incredibly good."

    Not much of a criticism IMO..... I still love retro games more than modern day games, but you have to remember modern day gaming is all about eye candy not gameplay... well, thats at most developers seem to think with the games they are currently producing.

  5. You know I love you bud. Seriously if I wasn't already married (and you were a blonde with huge cans) I'd put a ring on you.)

    so did your body over mind preference determine in the selection process for your wife? :)

    On the NYI/NYR issue, I found the fix.

    On a standard rom, goto F7C96 and change the value to 0000 2D2E which tells the rom to look at the team name offset for the NYI, not the specially allocated offset (which appears shortly after) to allow the game to display the extra Islanders text.

    Do the equivalent for NHR.... see attachment for reference.

    It doesn't break the rom. works as expected. Special text can be changed to what ever with no effect as the rom no longer uese it. In my pic, you'll see I set it to FFFF FFFF .... just for the F*** of it...

    I should be able to integrate this into the editor without much heartache at all.

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  6. if you can't decrypt the message in the first attachment, you obviously haven't spent enough time in a hex editor looking for values.... ;)

    Now, can anyone explain to me why NHL94 (& 95) stores an additional instance of the text "New York Islanders" and "New York Rangers" at offset F7CB2 onwards... which it actually uses when cycling thru teams on the main menu... which inturn ignores the team name within the team data? :)

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  7. Re:rendering.... Normal and Double only makes a difference in Windowed mode. If you run in Full screen mode, there is no visible difference.

    Scan lines basically give you a TV like look & feel when playing on your monitor.

    The other blitters add smoothing effects to the graphics... I personally don't like it.... normal is more authentic.

    Turn off Stretch....

    Turn on Vsync.... basically reduces graphics tearing in fast moving games....

    As for controllers, I uses a Playstation2 to USB converter for my PC... its nice as you can use the analogs sticks to input the digital pad movements which works well.

  8. have you found anything useful from the disassembled code yet?

    No I still haven't got around to looking at that. As I have no former knowledge of ASM, I decided to concentrate my free time on the editor and implementing what I can find with a simple hack and test procedures.

    I'm sure all that knowledge attained doing this will help me when I decide to look at the disassembled code, and should hopefully allow me to find more goodies.

  9. After noticing how teams where stored when I stumbled across the playoff matchup data, I decided to take another look for the bytes which control what teams where seleted when you start up NHLXX.

    The good news is not only did I find it, but it only took about 5 minutes this time round! :)

    The better news is the surrounding bytes found control all the default options on the main menu screen allowing you to set things like penalties on by default when you start up the game.

    For the NHL94 ROM, the menu data offset is 0x00017C8E

    Each two bytes relate to the menu items as shown from top to bottom.

    0000 - Play Mode: 0000 for Regular season, 0001 for Continue Playoffs, 0002 for New Playoffs etc.

    0001 - Players: One - Home by default... etc

    000B - Team 1: Montreal..... 0000 for Anaheim thru 001B for for ASW.

    000A - Team 2: LA ... same rule as above

    0001 - Per. Length: 0000 for 5 min, 0001 for 10 min, 0002 as 20 min (or as hacked)

    0000 - Goalies: 0000 Manual, 0001 Auto

    0001 - User Records: 0000 On, 0001 Off

    0000 - Penalties: 0000 Off; 0001 On; 0002 On, Except Off-Sides (sorry, 0003 doesn't = "On, with fighting" unfortunately! :P)

    0001 - Line Changes.... sure you can work it out by now! ;)

    Same logical works in NHL91 thru NHL95. Hex offsets are as follows:

    NHL91 ROM 0x0000E698

    NHL92 ROM 0x0000EA7E

    NHL93 ROM 0x00014438

    NHL95 ROM 0x00086700

    NHL94 ISO 0x0004C920

    will look at NHL96-98 another time, unless someone does it for me *hint* ;)

    Hopefully Evan can make a beautiful looking, more descriptive web page to add to his other hacking pages that details this find.

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  10. The offset truely starts at Hex 000 030E, two bytes eariler as the rom uses the 4 bytes for the each of the team offsets... e.g. 0000 5330

    While its really not utilized in the ROM versions of NHL, the team order data in the NHL94 ISO has the first team offset as 0001 FD8C.

    The nice thing is all NHLs roms have the Team Order data before the Team Data of the first team.

    The ugly thing is there is other a lot more involved in changing the order. Changing the offset doesn't change the order of the banners etc, so things quickly get out of wack when you mess with the offset order.

    Even if you look at the data that contains the team summary as spoken by the announcer. Each team's summary is separated by the hex byte 0D (from memory) in an order that matches the original team order. I don't know whats involved in changing the banner order. Hopefully there is offsets, but I haven't ventured the far yet.

    This is why my development version of the editor supports moving players up/down, but not teams as it gets to messy and based on current knowlegde of the rom, adusting the team order is not as easy as swapping the team order offsets ;)

    Thats said, if you work out all the dependancies... I'll add it to the editor and credit you accordingly! :)

  11. After the testing the delete player function in my upcoming editor, I noticed the game crashed when trying to edit lines within the games. "Great!" I thought, more crap for me to work out. Good news is, I found it.

    In 94, the single byte before the two goalie bytes defines the amount of forwards and defense players.

    Anaheim for example has Hex 97, so 9 forwards and 7 defense players.

    Usual hex rules apply, A = 10, B = 11, .... F = 15.

    Playing the rom, it doesn't seem to care what the defense value is. If you change LD or RD it will show all players after the last forward player. As an example, set forward to 0 and when you change a LD or RD, you see all the players on the team roster. Try change a forward position and the game will hang! A value of 1 thru F must be used for the forwards. In the example pics below, I set it to Hex 10 to show the game will see the 1 forward appropriately, but all players after 1 are shown for defense proving the 0 means jack, even though all the defaults set in the original rom do add up to the exact amount of players a team has rostered.

    This is also valid for NHL95 and NHL93, but its a few bytes earlier as the 93 rom also carries team summary numbers within the team headers. See the pic for the exact location. Same rules as above apply (I assume, haven't tested).

    NHL96-98 do not use the four bytes after the colors and before the two goalie bytes. They are always hex 0000 0000. The play position summary data lives after the team name/initials/rink data. The 14bytes supports 28 players, and taking a guess, 0 is for goalies, 4 for LD, 5 for RD, 3 for LW, 2 for C, 1 for RW. Editing these values has no major affect as any player can be put in any position in-game unlike NHL93, 94 & 95.

    If anyone has worked out the other 3 bytes after the colors and before the goalie bytes in 93/94/95, let me know what the deal! :)

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    • Like 1
  12. As I was looking at a way to add more flexible player editing to the editor I am working on, I've been able to identify the data that appears after the teams is the playoff matchup data.

    Each byte (in groups of 16) define particular playoff matchups.

    For NHL94, this data starts at the hex offset 0000 5576, and contains 32 matchup ending before offset 0000 5776.

    00 refers to the first team based on the rom order data at that lives at 0000 030E, Anaheim

    01 is Boston... 1A(dec 26) is ASE, 1B(27) is ASW.

    There are limitions in how you must arrange your matchups. While I haven't explored it in full (only found this out today), some matchups can cause the rom to hang when switching left of right through the teams in playoff mode.

    The hex workshop pics attached are from a rom I hacked that include the All star teams in every matchup.

    While they are included, you still cannot select them to play with as yet.... that variable is yet to be found.

    Now as I am trying to concentrate on getting the editor finished for its initial release, can I leave this info with all the other hackers out there to see what more they can find out.

    All roms in the series have the playoff structure, and reference to the playoff data offset so what ever is found out should work for all roms.

    Happy hacking - Use the force!

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  13. very nice work evan...

    after originally finding the period length (by reverse engineering a game genie code), I thought the penalty times would be the same basic format... obviously not... no wonder it didn't see it! d'oh!

    interesting the way the programmers implemented it... they limited it to whole minute penalties... though I guess that is no issue for ice...

    I have to incorporate a penalty editing feature in my editor. :(

  14. Well a few others here (outside of the original beta group) who asked me for it also ended up getting the same beta aswell.

    Just remember if you do sell it, I want my 75% cut.... or I'll completely drop further development :victory:

    In short, limited free time and other (more prioritised) interests have meant i haven't touched it much lately.

    But then again, I don't know why everyone is waiting on me.. "cyberhacks", which is supposedly coming soon, is clearly going to future of the NHL editing scene.

    That said, I wouldn't hold my breath. These things usually take a lot longer than you are lead to believe, and when it does, I'm sure the web site will be pretty disappointing... :)

  15. The references made to SNES in this thread relate to SNES/Genesis emulation on a particular piece of video card hardware known as the ArcadeVGA.

    The only actual comparison made relates to in the game resolutions used on the original hardware/games.

    If you want to start a fanboy war over NHL on the SNES vs Genesis, then I suggest you start a new post. I'm sure many here will happily explain the differences and their preferences between the two.

  16. Haven't configured it with Mamewah myself, but I'm pretty sure you can find the required info if you search the BYOAC forums. I prefer the simplistic look of gamelauncher myself.

    For SNES gaming I use SNES9X as you can actually set the desired resolution based on what the video card offers. For SNES emulation, you want 256x240. Infact, the ingame resolution of the genesis hockey roms also runs at 256x240. Titles screens and menus are mostly 320(1)x240.

    I've always wanted to do a SNES9X FE version.... but making the changes wasn't as easy as it was making Gens FE/AVGA so I kind of gave up on the idea :lol:

  17. I play NHL on my cocktail cabinet from time to time, but yeah, the joystick controls are odd to get used to, so I usually use a PS2 controller with one of those USB convertors.

    Looks like you use a real arcade monitor? Are you running an ArcadeVGA with GensAVGA or GensFE?

    I'm the smuck who slightly modified the original code of Gens to create those mods for the BYOAC scene.

  18. Hate to break your heart, but its not nemesis compression!

    The following is the output from my command prompt window using a tool call nemsrch which you can find at http://hacking-cult.org/?utils/x

    --- Start ---

    C:\Hack\mdprog>nemsrch

    Searches the specified file for all potential archives compressed with the

    Nemesis compression algorithm.

    NEMSRCH infile [<options>]

    infile: The name of the file to search through.

    <options>

    -n Don't perform the test to see if the Nemesis compression algorithm

    appears to be used in the specified file. Use this option if the file

    you are scanning is not a complete rom.

    -p Add padding to files. Use this to get around the access violation error in TLP.

    C:\Hack\mdprog>nemsrch nhl93.bin

    The art compression format does not appear to be used in this rom. Continue?

    y

    Scanning for archives.... Done!

    No archives located in nhl93.bin

    C:\Hack\mdprog>nemsrch nhl93.bin -n

    Scanning for archives.... Done!

    No archives located in nhl93.bin

    C:\Hack\mdprog>nemsrch sonic.bin

    Scanning for archives.... Done!

    Extracting archives.... Done!

    154 archives successfully extracted from sonic.bin

    --- End ---

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