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von Ozbourne

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Posts posted by von Ozbourne

  1. This is great because it had a pattern that could be followed for the earlier games and it actually worked.

    If anyone is interested,  the locations for adding the "Hidden fourth option" are:

    NHL HOCKEY [92]
    ROM Offset: (hex)0000E855
    Change: 03 to 04

    EA HOCKEY [92]
    ROM Offset: (hex)0000E46F
    Change: 03 to 04

    NHLPA'93 [30 & 32 Team Versions]
    ROM Offset: (hex)00013D33
    Change: 03 to 04

    NHLPA'93 [Original Version]
    ROM Offset looks like it should be (hex)00013D1B
    as this follows the same configuration as the other games, however changing 03 to 04 there just seems to freeze the game before the animated EASN logo screen loads.

    Sadly, while it looked like the pattern held true into NHL'95 as far as finding a block of text that looked like the other games, changing this value did not appear to do anything, let alone activating the secret 30-second period option. NHL'96 - '98 did not however, keep the pattern intact, so there was not really anything to test yet.

     

    Extra curricular reading:
    Instead of changing the 03 to an 04, get crazy and try an 05!

    This didn't crash the game, but led to some "interesting" consequences.
    image.png image.png

    By my count "J" turned out to be the 27th number in the alphabet. So a period length set to an "Off, but fighting is okay" number of minutes ends up being 276:36 in length. Which may not be a threat to the 261 hours played in the world record hockey game, it's already almost 2.5 times the length of the longest NHL game. And you still have to multiply that by three. Just hope that after playing just shy of 830 minutes, you don't have a tie game.

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  2. Technically this game was built on the bones of EA Hockey because the PAL version has 50 fps and when you switch your emulator to NTSC 60hz, you get a 20% boost to everything [I think the overall physics were tied to refresh rate, so it's not just a matter of being faster] It gets intense.

    To clarify the intent though, this game was meant to have a bit of a double meaning with the title. The "beer" in the league also alluding to the fact that each team was sponsored by a beer company. Kind of like how in the first half of the 20th century, it was not uncommon for there to be leagues of amateur teams that were both sponsored as well as consisting of players that were bankers, or factory workers, or post office workers or what have you. This was back before there was the breadth of access to watch professional games, so if you wanted to see hockey, you had to organize your own games. And on attendance, I seem to recall some commentary that during a stint in the 1930s, some Montreal amateur teams were better attended than the not-yet-mighty Canadiens.

    So basically the sort of point of the game was that the teams were manned with employees of the respective breweries with the player numbers being references to significant dates in the history of those companies, since I went way too deep in that rabbit hole for some reason, and the stands are filled because they game free tickets to their employees, their families and their promotional marketing team and vendors and those tickets probably also included a seat to watch the game!
    [see the joke was that they were drink tickets... ah never mind]

  3. Eh, I actually already deleted the upper deck in the corners, so it looks like they are playing in a community centre. Figured that was alright. And besides, I tried making a side view empty seat sprite before and didn't like the results, so four rows of people is fine.

    Curious what one would do with player names in '92. The game doesn't have player stats, or even a line editor, so there is nowhere to actually view the players if they did have names. To that point, it might just be easier to transplant the fighting frequency and after whistle brawling back into '93. [although by easy I don't mean it won't still be stupid hard]

    Line indicators are a tricky one. I've found the sprites and was able to do some different things with transparencies to reduce the real estate they take up, but so far the only way I've found to eliminate them from the screen entirely is to play with line changes off.

  4. Figured I'd post these here.

    These are essentially the base ROMs of the original NHL Hockey [NTSC] and EA Hockey [PAL] with two minor fixes.

    First up: Finally figured out why the away team bench players had weird colours. They use different sprites from the home team... but... why? Corrected the sprites to match the home team and display the right colours.
    image.png

    North Stars are darker because the original game was using the pants colours for the entire uniform.

    image.png

    Using mod of EA Hockey to better display colour issue. Old yoke for both Home and Away teams used skin highlight tone and sweater in the pants colour.
    New sprites have the bench players' sweaters match the players on the ice. Also shortened the pants so they don't go down over the knee anymore.

    Fix number 2:
    image.png

    All-Star teams are teed up for Playoff mode shenanigans/personal modding options in NHL Hockey.

    image.png

    United States and Yugoslavia are available to try to win the EA Hockey League playoffs in EA Hockey.

    Fix #3 Penalty box player socks.
    image.png

    Problem with these ones is that unlike the bench players where the home and away players use different sprites for whatever reason, the penalty box players use the same sprites, but different palettes. Unfortunately I was not able to figure out where the code that determined this is located. If anyone can be bothered to figure this out, let me know eh.

    Never mind. Many thanks to @kingraph for figuring that one out.

    92 - NHL Hockey+Teams Fix.bin  92 - EA Hockey (E)+Teams Fix.bin

     

    image.png

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  5. Actually, figured it out. Seems that unlike the later games, the home and and away teams are using different sets of sprites. Seems redundant. And also prone to mistakes. As self illustrated here.

    image.png

    It would seem that simply copying the lower [home] set of sprites over the upper [away] set should fix the issue. Haven't found out for sure either way yet, but I'm wondering if this is also the culprit behind the penalty box sox.

    Looks like I'm going to have to update a few games...

    Edit: Confirmed

    image.png

    The penalty box guys are grouped in with the animated crowd sprites though, and there is only one set of them.

    image.png

    This likely means that the socks are listed in the overlays code somewhere, but I wasn't having any luck.

    Aside from that, I changed up the socks on the bench and sin bin sprites so they match the on-ice sprites a bit better.
    Definitely going to have to update a few ROMs now.

  6. 3 minutes ago, kingraph said:

    For example, let's say an image uses 100 tiles that are all displayed in a 10x10 layout.  You then reduce the image to a 10x9 image (90 tiles) and make the remaining 10 unused tiles transparent.  The displayed picture will be 90 tiles, but the game still loads all 100 tiles.  No effective change to image size on the memory.

    Alright. Couldn't help myself, quickly mocked up an idea and it looks like maybe a third of the original animated tiles would still move, while combining the classic and modern sensibilities.

    95PO-23.gif

    Assuming this is enough to not overload the memory, this might open up some interesting possibilities...

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  7. 3 minutes ago, kingraph said:

    Side note - my goal for the particular piece of the project was to reduce the size of the image used for the cup as it was causing an overload of the banner image.  I ended up shrinking the total size by just repeating the same 4 cup images, but technically the code was still changing images (i.e. spinning).  So I never really changed it to a static image.

    Hold on.... So does that mean that if say, to "reduce" the size of the image, one could theoretically trade the spinning cup out for a version of maybe half the size and have transparent/static image for the rest of the sprites and that might still work?

  8. 2 hours ago, AdamCatalyst said:

    Yea, I'm doing the same, but for much less ambitious ends

    Whoa whoa whoa! Just for the record, I was not trying to incorporate betting ads into my games.

    Actually... if you were just trying to disable some of the animations, you could always go the low tech method.

    I needed to disable some animation for a project that needed the arena to be smaller, a la community centre, plus while exploring options for the obligatory outdoor rink. Found the section where the sprites for overlaying the animated portions of the crowd sit here. Plus what might[?] be part of the code that controls animation as it directly follows the sprites and the games seem to follow that convention.

    What I ended up doing was just make the animation sprites that overlay the sections in question, into transparent blocks and called it good enough.

    image.png

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  9. Actually in all seriousness, I think this one might[?] be plausible, as there is some code after the animated sprite tiles that looks like[?] something similar to the animated Stanley Cup in '95 on the Playoff Bracket screen, but unfortunately any kind of messing around I tried with that just crashed the game.

    That being said, I didn't try that hard, so there is a good chance I was just missing some key thing. Or there is always that chance that it is compressed like the ref animations and off limits for the time being.

  10. 7 hours ago, AdamCatalyst said:

    Nice, thanks for this! Hopefully the little trading frenzy is over for a bit, but I am under the impression that releases a ROM hack actually increases the amount of NHL roster activity…

    GM's try to blame it on salary cap management, but we all know that they see a ROM update and call up their buddies to have a chuckle at our expense.

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  11. Huh, guess I missed that one. Didn't touch the penalties, so that would have been an artifact of whichever ROM I ended up borrowing as the base when I switched from 30 to 32 teams. Changed that and updated.

    Player names are a debate. Spell them properly and run into overflow or reduce them to the ten character limit and hope they don't look silly. Suppose we could open that debate again.

  12. With a few major roster changes occurring recently, we've put together a minor update to hold us over until the new year.

    There have been a small handful of roster moves since Version 1.0, but the most notable changes include:

    • Kane is in, Perry is out.
    • Goaltenders reevaluated and changed up in cases where the original projected #1 or 1A has been relegated to 1B or backup status.
    • Cleaned up a small number of player photos.
    • This new ref animation isn't new. but I'm just going to bring attention to it as a distraction.

    Faceoff.gif

    Added to original post as well.

    NHL 2024 - Retro 94 x 30th Edition v1.2.bin

     

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  13. Okay. I really like that new Shootout window layout, but I have to say it.

    15 seconds is not long enough!
    I feel like I'm at the start of a Mario Bros. level and that "hurry up" jingle is playing before I even get to move! Then I'm rushing and setting myself up for failure! I only won 2-0!
    Totally bogus! 7/10.

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  14. 2 hours ago, smozoma said:

    After tracking down the smozROM code (above), I think the problem was that I didn't change how the ratings are processed, I just changed the multipliers. The regular system uses a lot of 2s and 3s (which are encoded as 04 and 06), but I had to reduce it to mostly 1s (encoded as 02) to get the rating down to the 25-99 range. So a lot of the nuance is gone because most things need to be rated x1. 

    I finally had some time to examine this closer and I think that you caught it already. Looking at the 0-6 rating here.
    image.png

    Judging by that, as you said, the 0-15 seems to just add more increments to the pre-established scale. I guess it just threw me off because perhaps in the 0-6 scale, 6 is considered "super human" and used sparingly, but they still wanted those 3s and 4s to seem respectable rather than have the median be actually 50%.

    Maybe it's just a me thing, but I would figure that to make better use of the added increments, the numbers could be something like 0=20 and each increment could increase that number by a flat value of 6. This would result in E=104 and F= a "superhuman" 110. Obviously this is just a preference based on a compulsion for equal numbers, but without the ability to do it myself, I can't really flex any authority on the matter. It just seemed like a missed opportunity to me to not take advantage of the extra nuance afforded by the new scale, but again as you say, one is still beholden to the limits of the code in which the game was built.

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  15. @AdamCatalyst I sent you a message with my distillation of editing weights as displayed in the game as explained to me by Smozoma earlier [if that is what you were referring to specifically] and if it isn't, it is really interesting nonetheless.

    @smozoma As an aside perhaps to the Overall player rating in a 0-15 scale as interpreted by the ROM, I had made a test game where all of the player attributes were set to the same value [all 1s, 2s, 3s, etc...] and I was noticing that I was getting an overall of 99 with all D's, E's and F's and all B's and C's were already over 90. [I'll send some screen shots later to explain better, but I'm supposed to be finishing my breakfast and getting ready for work, not doing research for a game] I suppose that this is an extreme case and not how the player attributes are supposed to be used in a "real" game, but it just seemed like something was off, if the top third of available rating options all gave you a score in the top 10%.

  16. 8 hours ago, smozoma said:
    10 hours ago, AdamCatalyst said:

    @von Ozbourne Sorry for spamming your thread, but I can't get over how phenomenal your player photo work is. It doesn't just look better, it looks and feels authentic to what the players would have looked like if they were 16-bit video game characters. I love it so much. 

    Yeah I'm curious about the process... What kind of image adjustments you make before putting them in... Saturation and contrast boosts? Then dither with a predefined palette in photoshop?

    To start, Many thanks.

    To be honest, I was actually messing around with the idea of colour photos last year, but the team photographers were so inconsistent with the lighting and colour adjustments that it was just not worth the effort. This year however, they did a much better job of being at least in the same vicinity tonally, even if some teams would have a different fill light here or there or end up with a less vibrant set of images. But, it was all close enough that it seemed worth revisiting. Still wasn't sure though until I actually made that Dave Reid image. I'd gotten it ready for index colouring by setting a custom palette with all eight of the default grey tones and limiting the image to 16 colours and found that it was able to give me that image using only five skin tones. Emboldened with this knowledge, I tried an assortment of player photos using those same five tones and white, black and mid grey and it actually looked nice.

    As for what I had to do to the photos, given that they were so close to start, I was able to set up some photoshop actions to bump the vibrancy and contrast and brightness just a little bit before converting to eight colour index. I actually find that vibrancy works better for me than saturation and combined with a subtle brightening with probably a maxed out contrast and after going through the cropping and resizing, probably about 2/3 of them were good enough already.

    For some of the duller, darker, washed out players, I did go back and add some preset vibrancy, brightness/contrast adjustments, and that took care of a good chunk more so I think maybe only 10% of the total pictures actually required some manual attention. And even in these cases It was a lot of just going back to those vibrancy and contrast settings. In the more extreme cases, I would use dodge and burn to darken some forehead glare if the flash was too hot or darken the mid tones around areas like the nose or jaw to increase the contrast in just those areas. In some cases I ended up using layers, where I would overlay a copy of the image but with the layer properties changed to "soft light" or "overlay", occasionally in tandem with masking off areas so only certain features were adjusted. And then usually the top layer was a copy of the original but the layer property set to "colour" in order to preserve the original tones. This mind you is only in the extreme cases luckily so I didn't need to do this too many times. And luckily I didn't have to worry about too many bubble players who missed picture day this time, so trying to match a kid's junior photo to everyone else, wasn't an big issue.

    Anyway, armed with these tools, while constantly switching to the index colours I settled on after each adjustment, allowed me to see what was going to work in game. I did however restart about a third of the way through due to a change in direction with the dithering. [interesting you both touch on that in a way] I originally settled on a 30% dithering effect since it was subtle enough with the small images, but then I realized that I still didn't so much like it when it was up-scaled as it looked too "retro computery" rather than staying true to what old-school console game art looked like. To me anyway. So I bumped it down to 10% and that's what you see there.

    Sorry if this is getting long winded, but I guess the takeaway is that luckily the source images were very consistent this year, otherwise I probably would have just settled on black and white again. But since setting up a few automated batch actions was able accomplish what I needed for the majority of the pictures, I didn't feel like I was wasting my time on a foolish idea this year. Hopefully the team photographers do me a favour and keep this up next year.

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