von Ozbourne

It should be noted that the offsets for some assets in the 30-Team and 32-Team versions of '94 are different. Given that it is not hard to simply limit the number of selectable teams, you might find it easier to just use the 32-Team version for every mod you want to make and not have to make any adjustments to notes when you might need to switch. Can't say I know what mods were applied to both examples though. I've been using a version that started out as a slapshot67 ROM but has acquired a lot of additional mods that have been discovered over the past few years to the point where the only thing I can say for certain is that it still has 32 teams.

Yeah... I don't really have a good answer for this. Technically a player's photo is locked to a position on a team. There is a way to adjust this in the hex code near the beginning of the ROM, but for intents and purposes, a photo of say Alex Ovechkin is not locked to a player named Alex Ovechkin, but is just the photo in slot number 793, which is by default assigned to the 13th player on the 31st team, which just so happens to have player data with the name Alex Ovechkin. The problem is that if the next roster update has a player in one of those previous twelve spots get traded away, or a player is added who slots in ahead of Ovechkin alphabetically, then Ovi is no longer the 13th player and his photo no longer lines up. The good news is that line changes don't matter, so whatever you do there is not going to mess up the photos. There is a way to realign these photos in the hex code, but that can get a bit faffy if you make any typos. The EARE tool has this function as well, and I even made a cheat sheet at one time, but I don't bother with that anymore either. There is probably a better way to do it, especially seeing as I will make a photo for all 832 available players, but the way that gives me the most control and allows me to double check that there are no errors, is to have a full roster list open, either in NOSE or a spreadsheet. My default ROM has every player photo initially just a blank square with a big ol' number on it. And my folder of player photos has a full array of 48x48 indexed colour images with the player name as the file name. Then I just alt+tab back and forth from the list and Tile Molester copying the player names and Edit > Paste From and paste the player names into the File Name window. Luckily you don't even have to add the .png or .jpg or whatever file extension to import the file. As long as the name matches, just hit enter and the photo is there. Then just advance a Relative Offset of 36A bits [yes I have all of these numbers memorized] using the F5 button for subsequent photos and Paste From the next guy on the list. Is this a time consuming method? Absolutely! Does my left hand now have the evolutionarily useless muscle memory for all this alt+tabbing copy/pasting? You know it! Is there possibly an easier method but I now do this one to avoid any mistakes and double check things line up and look good during the process rather than having to go back after the fact? Got me there! Given the workload, I kind of see why some other guys would only do the starting line-up and leave the rest of the team with generic pixelated dudes, but I like the idea of every player having their own photo and have kind of been committed. As in "to the bit" not the other meaning... never mind.

1. It wasn't what I remembered, but maybe you saw this one? It's old and only referenced the 30 team ROM and the screen shots are in a download or on a ad laden image hosting site, but it's a decent start. I don't have a decent thread to refer you to, but if you're looking at a 32-Team ROM, the banners and logos are located at: Team Banners Location: 1DD370 Size: 11x64 Colours: 366884 Colour Size: 32 Menu Select Logos Location: 1D38B0 Size: 6x6 Colours: 1914022 Size: 512 2. Technically the players can be copy/pasted in at any time during your modding process. Sometimes I leave it for last, sometimes I have all the data and photos ready at the beginning and I do that first, right after the teams are set. Because the players can be copied over at any point, it's not that vital to do them right away. Team names and selection order however is a bit more locked in so that is usually something you want to take care of at the beginning. This way your banners, menu logos, on-ice logos, team colours, and of course players, can be changed at any point in your process and you won't have to redo any of them should you find that you need to move some teams around to accommodate different team orders from alphabetizing, division alignment, number of playable vs non-playable teams... whatever.

Thanks man. I noticed that the text seemed to be getting layered, but not knowing why, I just ended up changing the offending "the game" to "Out for " so it would at least display properly. This is obviously a much better option. What I still can't figure out though is why the ":" at the end of "Injury to:" is now displaying as the "RD" character. Barring a real fix, I just changed the text to a blank space.

Yep, you are correct. Actually this issue was because of Laila Edwards. My pre-tournament info had her listed as a forward, but the official game sheets had her on defence. I had switched my spreadsheet, but due to the nature of the importing tool, had to manually change the names. Evidently I ran into some version control issues because I remember doing that. The Lines are correct even after just pasting in the new name order, so clearly I must have at some point. Anyway. Fixed it now. v1.1 in the original post.

It is a good Friday to play hockey. 4.0 updates in the original post.

This does make me wonder how the Save Lines function works now. As in if I go into a game with line changes off, set and save a line, then reset and start another game with line changes on, then go into Edit Lines and load your save. What happens then? I know that this will just load your NLC saved line into the SC1 spot, so if you want those to be different, you will need to re-edit your SC1 line. But now the question is what happens with your NLC line? Does loading a save mean that this line is also loaded up behind the scenes or is it completely ignored by the code of a Changes On so you're locked into whatever default was already set.

Ah. Curious, so would that basically just be the NLC line? As in a team's best players anyway, but ones that might not be on a regular line together in reality? Now I'm thinking this is kind of like a "Desperate nuclear option" when say Edmonton would put McDavid and Draisaitl together. Or Crosby and Malkin in Pittsburgh. Or what Winnipeg should have done when they had the chance and put Nikolaj Ehlers on the top line. Admittedly, my preference would be to have a proper 4th line, but barring that, this seems like an interesting alternative.

Yeah sorry, that was perhaps a mistake. The date represents the fixing of a feature in the ROM itself and not the current-ness of the roster. So I just updated the ROM but didn't add a .1 before re-uploading. That said, I'm just collecting photos for the new call-ups right now so version 4.0 is probably coming out this weekend barring any unforeseen issues.

If I may offer a hundredth of a two dollar bill, I find this idea intriguing, but I can't say I'd be a fan of this in practice. Without knowing how viable the line is, or being able to view it in the Edit Lines menu, it kind of feels like a gaffer tape solution. Plus there is the question of what line will that NLC line be in a game? Do you make it your 4th "Energy" line that you use sparingly and don't have to manage their... energy...? Or is it your first line because that is still what you would use if you play Line Changes off. In that case, is your opening line in a Line Changes on game technically going to be your SC2 Line? I feel like there are a lot of questions around this idea that lead me to think that depending on what the technical limitations dictate the final result is going to have to be, this may or may not be worth the effort.

Pardon my ignorance on this perhaps, but does the hardware version not follow the same course as the emulated version? I ask only because it's been my experience [I haven't played the hardware version of EA Hockey owing to living in an NTSC country] that after you complete a game and it displays the end of game stats and after the game expires and returns to the main menu, that end-of-game song just continues on through to the main menu the same way the title screen music continues on when initially turning on the game. My recommendation would be to play a game, hit start to end before any highlights come up and then just let the game sit on the main menu. ...maybe pressing the d-pad occasionally to prevent the game from starting another game before you get your sample.

In light of the fact that no art is ever really completed, just occasionally abandoned, I couldn't help but notice that this game would be better with fancy banners and fighting. The fact that these can be different is just cool. Two flavours available. Hockey Stars 1 [2.1].bin Hockey Stars 1 - Fighting Edition.bin

Yeaaaaah...... It took a few hours after I should have been going to bed, but I eventually got that behaviour back. I think there is an order of operations that needs to be followed with some of these transformative patches because I was running into so many issues. I don't even know how to explain the troubleshooting process because I was bouncing around between different versions with different mods applied in different orders and losing track of what I'd done and didn't done do. But the original idea was to have a mod with fighting, menu banners, fully highlighted playoff banners, in-game banners using the original modded sprites so they can be different, clock logos. Two problems I found were that after most of that was done, reverting to the original playoff banner highlighting code actually ended up with a ROM that only highlighted the team in the #1 slot, regardless of what team you were playing as. I then realised that this was on a version that didn't have fighting applied, and the version that did have fighting was even worse in that the game just crashed when simply trying to start a playoff. I eventually backpedalled enough to where I had a ROM that had the menu background mod removed, had an old fashioned method customized menu background and overlays applied, then had the banner mod applied to only the main menu and playoff screens, [clock logos weren't quite working in this particular instance so I omitted them], then switched the highlighting code to the original full banner setup and only then applied the fighting patch. [and then fixed all of the menu option changes that the default fighting patch undoes] Other than that slight stutter when loading the menu screen which I attribute to likely the extra step of loading in all of the team menu banners to RAM, everything else seems to be working as intended. Don't know if there is anything to be learned here other than be careful of applying multiple patches that may conflict with each other and sometimes a habit of testing limits will just end up testing your limits.

Not sure how easy it is to add the extra button. There is the following post but not sure if anyone has done anything with it (other hacks) or whether it works on expanded roms which is why I'm asking if anyone has experience of doing it. There was a third party site that relayed the process of getting the Y-Button hack to work. It relays how the process doesn't exclude the X & Z buttons, but it's a matter of what is possible in the game engine. That said, I know a percentage of players prefer the 3-Button controller. [my go-to is an 8-button configuration, but no one has figured out how to incorporate shoulder buttons into a Genesis/Megadrive game] This is why I suggested a D-pad option, but then that would need to overwrite the ability to keep skating around with the line change popup open so that might be a non-starter. I think the No Line Change line is a good idea though. There is even precedent with NHL Hockey and NHLPA'93 using the NLC line simultaneously as the 1st line. I don't know if the NLC and 1st line had any reason to be different back in 1994, and even these days, unless you have a Draisaitl or Malkin as your SC2 center that you want to promote to your SC1 winger, I don't know if there is much reason still to make those different. Curious how easier-said-than-done getting that popup to display four choices would be.

Technically. The smozROM tool just reverses the bit where the game engine calculates a successful check using player weights. But the problem was that the rest of the calculation is kind of based on a broken premise. There is a new fix that changes the calculation formula and works a lot better. The new info is accessible in this thread.

I will say that unless you have the time and are curious to see if you can do it, I wouldn't bother. The coach option is interesting and fun, if perhaps limited, and the only drawback it has is that it interferes with the line saving/loading option. Which personally I never use anyway so it's not actually a drawback for me. I understand some people like to use that function though, but you can't always please everyone, so sometimes you just have to please yourself. ...wait... never mind. This fix is really interesting in that is erases any differentiation between positional players, but the fact that the goalie is available as well is giving me pause. I don't know if I like it or not yet. I had no player taking the face off when I put my starting goalie at center. One would think there should be guard rails against this. But then, if you want to do something dumb that's your fault. It does kind of open up an option if you are making a ROM with small rosters and want to have the ability to put a backup goalie on the ice in a pinch, but then again it's translating those goalie stats into skater stats and those three "Leave @ 0"s kind of get in the way. I suppose you could not leave them at 0, but there is still the fact that goalies don't get credit for scoring goals in the player stats. [maybe that one can be figured out somehow] Either way, it's kind of a case where if you don't want to have a goalie as a forward, it's just easier to remove the option all together.

Rats. Oh well, that's fine. Back to "Plan A" I guess. I do have one other question though if I may @McMarkis I found that one really cool thing that I can do with this hack is emulate what NHL'95 does with having a different team banner for the menu and playoff screens that what shows up on the pause/game menu/jumbotron. But there is one catch in that the default only does the colour scrolling replacing white on the right side name portion of the banner now. There wouldn't happen to be an easy way to expand that highlight area to the full width again in the case where you are using this mod for something other than having a mini logo on the side is there?

Welcome! I'd say you could also add Step 6. Use chaos' Fighting Patch to add fighting to your ROM, but that's up to you. I would also note that of all of those tools, I'd say that EARE is the only one that I've only had to go back to once. It's perfectly fine to go back repeatedly. Just make sure that you don't open your ROM in multiple programs at once and lose track of which one is your current build. You may also want to save different numbered versions, but that's usually something that only comes in handy when you are going into hex editors and don't want to glitch your only copy and lose all your work. Also, your team colours can be edited in NOSE on the "Strips" window. The home team colours actually list the colour offset [in hex or decimal] that you can use when importing the center ice logos to make sure you get the right colours. There is a thread or two on this site that has a complete rundown of image offsets and colour palettes, but I'll be darned if I can find it right now. Searching the How To section should help at least. Good Luck!

Interesting. I might have to see what you did there. I had tried this banner hack on a 30-team, but that one was also heavily modified in other ways too, so I'm wondering if there is something else at play here.

Technically when using the All-Players-All-Positions hack that requires all players to be listed as D-men, you can still have forwards, they just don't show up in the Edit Lines list. But they do show up on the main menu player roll call and the Player Cards screens. So by setting one player to forward, I have a slot that I can put a non-player into and don't have to worry about someone trying to put the coach on a line. ...unless you want too. In my WWF ROM I had two non-playable managers on each team and one would be the "extra attacker" to run referee interference when the goalie gets pulled.

Oh? Is your ROM a 30 team version? Or 28 with a custom background? I've had the menu screen glitch for all of the ROMs I tested this on that used a custom background, but they were all also 32 Team versions. That said, I was able to simply change the pointer back to the original background and it worked fine. That also said, I have one that I did that had a custom menu background that was fairly simple and I could technically use the original background and just reorganise the tiles to make it look the way I wanted again. [he said as if that isn't a really time consuming method]

To be fair, that the Genesis version had three lines and the SNES version had four does make sense when you look at the controllers. That said if say, the Genesis version could be modified to use the D-pad instead and each direction is a different line, that would be a welcome addition.

Just noting for the record that this statement is *technically* true. Although there is a bit of a possible issue where you could actually put a goalie on as a positional player as well. Interestingly, I tried making an entire goalie forward line, but the game was smart enough to know that the starting goalie can't be in two places at once so I was playing short handed. Unfortunately this also meant that when I tried to load the saved line, the game froze at the point where it needed to load a goalie where it should not be. It did not crash when I wasn't doing something dumb though, so that is cool. [but you know I had to try it] Ironically, the one byte that is cancelled out to make everyone a D and every D in every place, is actually overwritten by your fix anyway, so the only thing I'd need to change was to re-label the Forwards and Defence and separate those guys again if I want the player cards to reflect that. One drawback to this however is that I have a couple ROMs where there are NPCs [Non-Playable Coaches] on the teams. This is accomplished by making the coach a Forward and since forwards are off limits with the other hack, it allows the coach to show up in the Main Menu roll call and Player Card screens, but not the Edit Lines, and that bit of interesting side info would go away. Interesting pros and cons to both of these options. Nothing that really affects primary gameplay, so it's mainly going to come down to preference of these secondary outcomes me thinks.

Nope that was an error in both wording and editing. What I've been doing with my mods for a little while now is making the Standard and Widescreen versions slightly different. Both get basically the same graphics edits, but since some of the new features have pros and cons attached depending on preference, the Standard version is meant to be keeping closer to the original while the Wide version gets a few more of the updated game mechanics. I just accidentally used the same line change code for both. I figure if you are the type that likes the wide screen hack, you will likely be more receptive to the other changes too. Anyway, even though the trade deadline version is nearing completion, I figured I'd replace the version 3.0W in the main post with a version that has the intended line change option.

Ah nice. Technically the ROMs in question are already resolved because I also ended up adding fighting anyway, but it's nice to know that this is an option going forward. Now if I can just get a patch with banners, logos, fighting and a custom menu background... I'll probably try to figure out a way to break that too.