von Ozbourne

Just a heads up. I tried playing a playoff game. Best-of-3, Original '94 teams, Conference seeding, All other settings left at default. Played one 2-player vs game. Won 5-0. Post game playoff stat screen came up and looked like this. By the way, I thought it was really cool how the jumbotron displays the series record. UPDATE: I don't know if this is related to the previous issue, but when I restarted the game, the menu got a bit funky. Although, I am leaning to it being related, because it did continue the playoffs when I pressed start. I also deleted the .srm file and reopened the game, and while I lost my playoff progress, the glitch went away.

It's not a moon either, just Adam destroying everyone. Is it weird that I played most of one game and then had to stop to open the ROM up in TM and HxD to figure out how you made the player photos use double the normal amount of colours? I am in awe and I hate you for that.

Actually that might be tricky. I was mainly the art guy on this one, so I didn't really look at rosters and playoffs matchups, but I do know that only the original 26 teams are available in either mode due to game engine limitations. On a side note, while '92 through '95 structure their playoffs in the standard four division format, '96 though '98 actually incorporated the 1-8 format with reseeding, that kind of makes sense to anyone who isn't on a broadcast network that only covers hockey as an afterthought/gambling opportunity. This just means that playoffs will be a bit different than expected in a 2027 season. The Season mode question has its own currently insurmountable hurdle in that in addition to only allowing for 26 of the 32 teams to participate, there is a cap on how many games can be played anyway. The math maths out to 26x41 games so every team will get to play 82, but the standings will only recognise the first 26, and testing to try to include the "All-Star" teams in games kind of just creates opportunities for glitches. Not to mention that if games were played against those other teams, it could create some unbalanced schedules since giving away games to other teams means not every team will reach 82.

I'm not a tech bro so I mainly see the problems with AI as vastly outweighing the benefits, especially in the visual art sphere. But you do raise a good point with the player photos. I did mainly convert the player photos and a few other assets from Baseball Stars 1, 2 and Pro to make the Hockey equivalent, but that was the parameters of the design choice I'd set for myself to make it look as much like it was made by those development teams as possible. Even at that, I was doing a lot of mixing and matching and making a few custom assets using bits of the originals as a design base, and that still took a long time. And actually even though it could use a clean up, your conversion to real 16-colour kind of hid some of the ultra-clean shininess that makes the original pixel art look like it's sitting in that AI uncanny valley. Knowing what I know from experience and seeing how professionals did those redrawn sprite images back in the day, the prospect of redrawing 26 player photos, per team, is daunting. And now that I've pretty much rolled slapshot's 34-Team mod as my exclusive base ROM of choice, that means a total of 884 photos. Even with streamlining the process, just converting photos to 8-bit already takes a while, never mind redrawing every single one. Maybe if I was being paid for this, I might engage in that level of insanity, but given that I've done my best to meet the eligibility requirements to maintain my amateur status, I have also thought about seeing if I might employ AI to convert my photos for me. I actually have a back-burner project that would be perfect for this art direction if it can work [the justification being that I would only be stealing work from an unpaid intern]

The logos vs uniforms is always a bit of a compromise for some teams. It's because everything in the rink uses one of four palettes: Rink, Home Team, Away Team and Crowd colours. Looking at the colour changes for Settle, it wouldn't be hard to switch the logo to work with the new uniforms since all of the colours are still basically there and '97 gives you the benefit[?] of one unused player strip colour that can be used on the logo without affecting the uniforms. Chicago on the other hand will need a choice. I noticed that you changed all the teams from using wood to carbon fibre sticks. Makes sense given that this is a modern day mod, but the drawback is that Chicago's logo was using the stick tan colour as one of its main colours. I think Ottawa would experience the same issue, although the grey and tan might be close enough to not be a big problem.

Kind of cool, but looks like AI.

I have to admit that this doesn't really help me. Genesis Plus GX isn't really my daily driver emulator when testing ROMs and with the address errors displaying like that, I can only guess at what they are referencing. The other unhelpful thing is that I know that I have gotten an error of some kind with several different mods based on the same 32-Team base starting point, and resetting seems to get rid of it because I can't repeat the error even under the same circumstances. That said, it does say Power Play though so I am wondering one thing. I think I remember an issue at one point where under a certain set of circumstances where when a penalty ends, there was the potential for the game to glitch. Wondering if that is what was going on prior to this, and if I can find that information again if it turns out to be the case.

Ooooh. Sorry I misinterpreted. I had a case where I accidentally changed a goalie position and thought you were referring to the same thing. You meant the "C" by the goalie bytes. Yeah that doesn't really have any specific meaning. Many mods in '94 will use an "F" instead. It's just meant to delineate that there is space set aside for the goalies and the letter doesn't really seem to matter, just that there is one. I have occasionally run into some weirdness where I was testing some games and put random numbers in those goalie byte slots and the backup had a higher number than the starter. For those teams, the game actually preferred to start the backup instead of the #1. So that was weird and seems to makes sense that most games will have the backup goalie bytes listed as just a "1" when the starter gets an "F", or in this case "C".

Interesting... I was referring to something like this. The Goalie is listed as a Center and doesn't show up in the team list as a goalie even though in a game he is perfectly functional as a netminder when playing a game.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention the "C" thing. That just means that the Goalie is set up to be a Center. You can go into the player data in NOSE and change that with the drop down before the player name. Actually you will probably want to do that since even though that goalie will still act like one in how the stats and line changes are handled, but if you ever try to make a trade with that team, you will get an error that any trade is invalid since you don't have 2-3 goalies. Only getting that error with v3.0 and up makes sense. That's when I added the fighting patch. No need to worry about it though. It is just an issue with the menu options and has no effect on the player data.

The goalie bytes are kind of weird in that the number doesn't really seem to do much in a practical sense. It's basically just a binary 0=Off, 1=On where "1" is arrived at by: "Is "1" the mathematical answer to dividing the following number by itself?" So for all intents, if you don't want a goalie in that spot, it's a 0, if you do want a goalie in that spot, it's something other than 0. As a side note PSA, since you mention 4 goalies, but I know you do stuff with '97, you should probably know that you can't have four goalies. I figured this out when making a different project and found that one team always crashed when trying to look at stats or make trades. Eventually saw that it also glitched when trying to change the goalie. Turned out that I had given that team four netminders and for some reason, in spite of what NOSE says, '97 and '98 [and probably '96] just doesn't cooperate with having a fourth netminder. I had to delete the .srm files and start fresh with every team maxed at three goalies, but everything worked as it should right after that. It's odd because '92 will only let you have a max of 2 goalies and NOSE sticks to that, but there it is. As for the "Overflow" error when deleting a player, that seems to just be an issue with NOSE dealing with those later games as well. My guess is that it's related to the reorganisation of bytes after a player's data is removed, but I haven't really looked into it since functionally, it doesn't affect the ROM in any way. [beyond the player being deleted obviously] Just hit Okay and carry on. That last error, I'm guessing you are opening up a ROM with the fighting patch applied? This is related to the expanded menu hack and how the data had to be manipulated for the menu to accommodate the extra settings. In these cases you'll see if you look at the default menu setting window that everything except the Home and Away team is blank. Unfortunate part about this one is that any changes you have to save will end up blowing up the default menu and the only way I know to fix it is to go into a hex editor and reset the numbers manually. In '94 this is located @ 0x017C8E. If you saved some changes, it will probably look something like: FFFF FFFF 00xx 00yy FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF [xx is the number of the Home team, yy is the Away team] You can replace each "F" with a "0" to restore the menu default to the first option of any setting, or change a group to "0001" to default to the second listed option, "0002", for the third etc.

Semantically speaking it's the other way around. It is possible to expand and add the fighting patch to Adam's ROM, but there are a couple of things that need to be checked after the patch is applied. Most obvious is that Adam is using a different sprite colour arrangement from the default. Second was that depending on what version you are using, his player stats didn't include a fighting rating in their handed score, so everyone would have a 0 fight probability. I think he addressed that in version 3.9 but stopped short of applying the patch for you. I think the main thing is that his ROM seems to be constructed quite differently from most others and I know from trying to apply some other mods that I've used frequently, that they don't always play nice out of the box. That all said, and not to hype up next season, but I think we may just need to wait for '27 to see if these few issues are addressed for seamless fighting.

Okay so I noticed a small thing that bugged me in that I forgot to update the Playoffs logo at the bottom left of the "Stanley Cup Champs" team photo. So in getting rid of that I figured I would also do the thing with the unlockable teams thing. Original post now has three versions: Carolina vs Columbus [with Carolina vs Vegas unlockable] Carolina vs Vegas [with Vegas vs Columbus unlockable] Vegas vs Columbus [with Carolina vs Columbus unlockable] I was slightly distracted when swapping the assets around, but I think it all works out. [hopefully]

Nah it's possible, I was just taking the shortest path. In order for all possible matchups to available with no code, one would need to make a minimum of three versions. One with every possible match except vs Team A. One with every possible match except vs Team B. One with Team A vs Team B and a Team C getting hidden. Could do that with just some copy/pasting at least, so I could get that a bit later.

You just made me realise something that I probably should have figured out from the start. Rather than leaving Vegas as Team #32 and switching which Team #33 was subbed back in, I could have just as easily swapped in Vegas as a default team and have you use the code to swap in the alternate team. Like say exchanging #31 Seattle for Vegas in an alternate version and then unlocking Seattle or Vegas again with the code. Either way you would need to use a code to unlock Seattle vs Vegas, but every other matchup would be available by default. It's interesting that you mention the unlock code not working. I was having difficulty testing the team swap until I plugged in my retro-bit Genesis controller. If I'm just testing, I tend to use keyboard controls and before I got this controller, I was using an admittedly cheaper SNES-style retro controller. I believe that controller may have just been designed to act like a keyboard, because with my default emulator, I can't get the cheat code to work if I'm using my keyboard. Nor was it working when I only had my old controller. Interestingly, retroach doesn't care what control device I'm using, it just works.