von Ozbourne

Kind of the unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy wrapped in a feedback loop that one eh. EA wigs: Nintendo fans only spend their money on first party games anyway, so why should we bother putting any effort into porting our games?" Nintendo fans: EA doesn't bother putting any effort into porting their games anyway, so I should spend my money on this first party game."

Alright, this is where things get interesting, because for this game I've started the retcon of the series. IIHF 94 - Championship Edition [Final Cut Edition] In this special edition game, the rosters are again expanded from 30 to 32. Team uniforms are again changed to better match their period correct styles. Player names are again modified where applicable to fit within formatting limitations. Extra branding for the World's which were held in Italy. For the first time ever, full league licensing! Center ice logos are now reflective of each team's uniform crest. Player cards were a bit of a debate. I originally used a freeze bug fix, but that also ended up breaking the playoff mode. And is seemed silly to have a "Championship" edition where you can't, you know, win the Championship? So I settled for the freeze bug, but this was well after I already committed to not having any photos past the starting lineups. I tried to see if I could paste in the full roster of photos as I had done for the "regular" 30 team version of '94 and reset the pointers in EARE, but my initial tests did not provide the desired results aaaand I realized that I couldn't be asked to figure it out. Or spend the rest of the evening trying to find player photos for the rest of the Australian and Spanish rosters. To accommodate something most people don't even look at. And even I don't that often. So here we are I guess. That ended on a sour note... It's IIHF '94 Special 32-team Championship Edition featuring licensed logos and packing a Six-pack! IIHF 94 CE F.bin

The one that started this journey is back upon us. Fitting that it also starts seeing the most drastic changes. IIHF 94 [Final Cut Edition] Starting with team uniform colours, quite a few ended up being changed yet still managed to accommodate the center ice logos. More fixing of some player names to accommodate formatting. Belarus. Dammit. Completely forgot about the four years they used their historic pre-Soviet era flag before adopting their current, kinda-like-the-Soviet-one flag in June of 1995. All markings have been corrected to reflect period accuracy. Center Ice logos still reflect previous licensing agreement. [IIHF itself and players, but not yet individual National teams] A few other minor tweaks that don't quite come to mind right now. This one gets Five for fighting. IIHF 94 F.bin

Up next, the "licensed" version that was released later that same year: IIHF 93 [Final Cut Edition] Starting off again with more period accurate team uniform colours. Again, some names were condensed to fit. While accurate team logos could possibly have been employed for the first time, this game also happens to feature an expanded team list to accommodate all 32 member nations as of 1993. The compromise was that those two additional teams ended up using up the free bytes that previously belonged to center ice logos. This results in more branding for the IIHF, with a standard center ice logo and all games being held in the location of the Pool A Championships, the Olympiahalle in Munich, Germany. While the controversial fighting is still in the game, the penalty for engaging in fisticuffs is now a 10 minute misconduct. [As opposed to 5 and a game] This one for par. Fore! IIHF 93 F.bin

Thanks man. I'll be honest, 2021 is on the list, however it's a long list and it's nearer the bottom. [and that was before I realized I wanted to fix the ones I've already done] On the plus side, I've figured out a bit more that I can do in the 96-98 base games, but <reasons> progress has been slowed a bit. I am curious though, I know '94 is obviously the most popular game to base mods on, [for good reason to be fair] but it's nice to play around with the other games once in a while too. Perhaps I need to take a poll to see the community would like to see. And if I want to deviate, I suppose I could always just make base versions from '94 and "Championship Editions" using a different year's game...

Moving right along (doog-a-doon doog-a-doon), the black sheep that was: International Hockey '93 [Final Cut Edition] This game still has the distinction of being the one that momentarily lost the IIHF licensing due to the new fighting features, but also being the first one where the various countries' player's associations agreed to lend their names to the game. Names which were occasionally truncated to fit into the allotted characters. Again, uniform colours were adjusted to better match the period correct look. Being unlicensed, the logos remain based on national coat-of-arms. Thunderbird 3 is go International Hockey 93 F.bin

Pity really. Aside from the old HNIC theme obviously, I thought it would be cool to have a version of the Blades of Steel theme. I know the NES has Famitracker, but so far the 16 bit music makers I've heard of don't seem to have a feature for letting you import <Genesis version of .NSF> files back into a game. So at least it's not just an "us" problem.

Next up: IIHF Hockey '92 - Final Cut Edition. This game was another that mainly just needed uniform corrections. The logos are still not licensed as of this stage in the series, [the vertical orientation, inconsistent/smaller logo sizes, and the single 16-colour palette shared amongst all 24 teams, with the U.S. and Yugoslavia sharing a logo.... all make that task a bit more complicated] And as there are no player names, this one didn't have anything to change there either. Round Two - Fight IIHF Hockey 92 F.bin

In honour of the return of the World Championships with this year's tournament in Latvia, I'm going to start posting some updated ROMs for my World Championship series. Mostly these are intended to resolve some anachronisms that came about due to some difficulties in finding complete information regarding logos, uniforms , etc [or in the case of Belarus, completely forgetting a four year span of their history.] Most obvious fixes will be uniform colours, which have been adjusted to be more period accurate. [as possible within the limits of the sprite art] Some player names have also been truncated to fit into the "ten character last name/twenty overall" limits for cleaner player name displays. I've adjusted the timeline on licensing to allow for complete national team uniform logos to be used. This will be fully implemented into all teams' center ice logos by IIHF 96, with full licensing being negotiated for the "Championship Editions" of IIHF 94 and 95 only, prior to that. [Unfortunately, there is only the one communal center ice logo in the 32-team ROM for 93, or that could have been worked in as well. Oh well...] A few other minor tweaks like team name banners and logo colours [or in Belarus' case, changing their entire bloody flag <shakes head in shame>] Many thanks to the indispensable @EagleXIII for his help in filling in the nagging gaps in my research. So here we go again with the original IIHF Hockey released in 1991, now in "Final Cut" form. IIHF Hockey (91) F.bin Going forward, I will also be putting all of the "Final Cut" games into the original post for easier access.

Uh oh. Technically it's a "Nordic" rivalry as the region known as Scandinavia only refers to Sweden, Denmark and Norway. While English speakers have used the terms interchangeably, the region including Finland, Iceland the Faroes and Aland are only meant to be part of the greater Nordic region and to refer to them as "Scandinavian" will cause true Scandinavians to jovially smile while silently judging you for being an unbeautiful, simpleton, ie: a non-Scandinavian. [What Scandinavians think of Finland] Interested in trying this out by the way.

Been quite some time, but it's finally time to release the final game in the Genesis/MegaDrive World Championship series. This one ended up having an unexpected amount of stuff to do [especially since I had always passed it off as yet another reskinning of the NHL 96 engine], not to mention simultaneously assembling a note file so I'll actually have some idea of what the hell I'm doing when I have to go back and fix something. Either way, this game feels like the game that EA was supposed to release in place of what would now be called the "Early Access" version that is NHL 97. Interesting that it took outsourcing to THQ to do it... So anyway... Presenting IIHF 98! Released in 1998 ahead of the World Championships in Switzerland, this will be the eighth year and eleventh installment in the World Championship series for the 16-bit SEGA console. The game features the top 26 teams by IIHF ranking and the rosters from that year, plus five bonus "unranked" teams. While many aspects were carried over from the previous two year's games, outsourcing this one resulted in a number of graphical changes that set it apart from its NHL counterpart. [Again the team ratings proved to be an issue, but the interesting part is that the "solution" proved perfectly fine as the supposed #1 overall rated team didn't even make the playoffs in half of the simmed seasons, making it a somewhat irrelevant metric.] While THQ took over development of the NHL game this year, the IIHF was not impressed with last year's game EA developed game, and insisted that the old development team return to work on the IIHF version. Team 1920 took the opportunity to not reuse any assets from the previous game and create a whole new look. In addition, this is the first year that a full licensing agreement was made with the IIHF, allowing the game to feature the national team logos of every team at center ice and not just the ones that were negotiated separately. Also additional IIHF official sponsors were included on the Jumbotron even though the team logos were taken out. The modest dev team may have also included a tongue-in-cheek jab. While the team photo was held over, a new "Winner is You!" photo was created in honour of the Olympics that were recently completed. This image may or may not have taken the better part of an evening to get just right due to the multiple palettes required and limited number of sprite tiles to work with, plus grinding through some mental fatigue, so dammit I'm showing the silly thing off! New player award art was also created. While not understanding the inclusion of an "EA Award" [which basically had the same selection criteria as the Hart, Ross and Pearson anyway], it did make for an opportunity to include another sponsorship mention. Anyway, that's enough adoing for one night. Hope this one holds up. IIHF 98.bin

Huh, It could also be that I simply conflated the two, as dudes that are heavy and good at hitting, would obviously also enjoy going around handing out free hits. Still find it odd that checking preference would affect the player's overall score [as many as 6 points] when shooting and aggression rightly don't. I will say that I have been spending a lot of time recently, exclusively with the later games and the stats seem to be slightly different. And not just in that a "0" score translates to a 40-44 in-game rating, all 5's is a 100 overall player, and all 6's = 120 overall. And then there is the mysterious "Unknown" stat for goalies in the 96-98 engine. Not sure what this "Unknown" goalie stat is. I've speculated that this might be a goalie's preference to play/freeze the puck after a save, but I'm not positive. Another question mark is "Durability" as I've injured starting goalies by charging them [Osgood seems particularly susceptible], but it's not something that I've been able to check into enough to find a pattern.

I noted that Checking is a rated stat. [As in when the number is in/decreased it likewise affects the player's overall rating] and that it seems to influence a player's ability to execute a check. A 6 will mean that you can Scott Stevens anyone into oblivion while a 0 means you're basically just caressing their shoulders as they brush past you. Roughness and Aggressiveness don't affect overall rating, but seem to be there to influence preference. I'd always figured that Roughness would influence penchant for taking penalties and throwing hits, where Aggressiveness would be chasing the puck/challenging the shooter type stuff, but I've also heard that Roughness may also be mislabeled from shot/pass preference and Aggressiveness is actually the taking penalties thing. Makes sense for the aforementioned Bourque with his 5 Roughness [apparently to go with his 6 shot accuracy] and 2 Aggressiveness [didn't take that many penalties] On a side note: I found another NHL98 "Mr Average" in Edmonton's Ralph Intranuovo. Look at all of those 3's... Not quite a perfect clean sweep as the Center position is fifth in the list, although the player number of 3² kind of tries to compensates for that in a mental gymnastics kind of way?

Just came across this guy in NHL 98 and figured it might qualify. We'll call him the Calgary Flames', Cale "Mr. Average" Hulse. Coincidentally enough, Right D is also the third position in the list. Too bad James Patrick already took number 3 and he didn't weigh 16 lbs less or he could have gone for the sweep.

I always figured weirder than Beezer's short name was that he can face off against his clone in Florida. And if Florida plays the other New York team, Fitzpatrick gets to be the back up for both Beezer and Healy, just like back in the pre-Original 6 era. Weird because they did have a team of clones in NHL Hockey with San Jose [although you couldn't really tell with only player numbers], but they did a decent job of limiting clones in '93, only to mess up again with Anaheim and Florida a year later.

I can confirm that this is "possible". The caveat however is that you will need to do a bit more to the ROM to prevent the game from crashing when it's trying to access those non-existent players in the Pre-Game Scouting Report or Line Editor menu. I guess it might depend if your play style is to ignore all of that.

If you wanted to, you can change that actually. First time trying out NOSE, I accidentally toggled off "Auto Re-Order Lines on Move" as well as on delete. [the "L" icons on the top of the Players window] Was a bit annoying as I was changing things around and had to fix the lines after each change. Didn't discover the reason for the problem until I moused over all of the icons to see the tool tip pop up. I can see pros and cons to having that set on or off, although typically setting the lines is one of the last things I do now so it's not that important anymore.

Actually I've tested that after @kingraphhelped me find the offset for those pre-game ratings. They don't seem to have any relation to team performance. And frankly the fact that they are hard coded in the game data when you can create and trade players at will just seems weird to me. [I mean, the original NHL Hockey would change the pre-game lineup checkmarks after the player stats were tweaked in NOSE and they didn't even allow trading in that game!] I can add to that that in my testing of NHL96, whatever the team performance rankings [Powerplay, Goalie, etc...] were, this seemed to correlate with the teams performance in a season. This was why when I was testing my graphics changes in my IIHF mod I would end up using Estonia [originally Detroit] I also tried editing the teams in both in game trades [traded all of the worst ranked players to Detroit and all of the best ranked players to Ottawa] as well as editing player data in NOSE [changed all Colorado and New Jersey player attributes to 0, overall 40s, and Anaheim and Winnipeg to all 6s, overall 120? (99)] Didn't make a lick of difference. Detroit, Colorado and Jersey still made the playoffs, Ottawa and Anaheim didn't, and Winnipeg was swept in first round. However, I will note that I tried this again, using Winnipeg as my selected team this time, and they won. But I've already noticed that game does seem to give a stat boost to the player team anyway. Somewhere in there is also how end of season awards are determined. For example in my IIHF 95 ROM, China's Hua Geng [formerly known as Calgary's Mike Vernon] would routinely win the Vezina despite being rated something more fitting for a 25th ranked team. The good news is that while 97 seems to suffer from the same faulty logic, 98 seems to have a bit more randomness inserted into the AI. The first two times I tried to sim a complete season, as the defending-and-soon-to-be Stanley Cup Champion Detroit Red Wings no less, I didn't even make the playoffs! I then ran through eight more simmed seasons as different teams and ended up with eight different Champions [none of which were my team]

I am curious about this. Haven't had the time to figure this out by myself, but how much does the order affect? Specifically, in '95 it would be nice to have the teams perform in season mode as you might expect their team ratings would suggest. In lieu of being able to edit the behind the scenes ratings [that annoyingly have nothing to do with the pre-game rating number], would arranging your teams to correspond with the ranking of the NHL teams you are replacing, and then alphabetizing them after the fact, mean that the teams would perform more realistically in simulated games? The additional problem I've encountered with 96-98 is that NOSE doesn't allow you to set the default menu and match-up options [which is too bad since I usually prefer 10 minute periods with line changes]. So in addition to reordering teams to best match the Even-Strength, Power Play, Goalie, etc.. ratings that would determine simulated season and playoff performances, it could also be a workaround for configuring the teams you want to replace the previous year's Stanley Cup finalists. I just haven't worried about it yet as i don't know how well it would affect what I want to do and would rather avoid wasting the effort for naught.

Figured as much. Glad to hear you're on the case.

I'm curious about this myself. Not to give false hope, but I noticed while poking around in NHL98, that the Carolina Hurricanes graphics and roster data were located in the spot between Florida and Los Angeles [where Hartford should be]. So while I know this is possible, in 96-98 at least, it would be related to pointers somewhere in the hex data. The only tiny issues here being that this is assuming that this knowledge is even transferable to the 94 game engine and I have no idea where to find that data anyway. That said, if it turns out that this isn't possible, I would be willing to volunteer my services to rearrange the graphics. I have a player card EARE companion "tool" that I've been looking to test more anyway. At least that would make the player photos a bit less bother to rearrange.

Just raising my hand, but I've actually road mapped and figured my way around most of the 96-98 engined games. Still a few holes to fill as far as code work goes, but I've gotten enough to go on to do complete graphical facelifts anyway. If you're interesting in diving into those I can save you some time by sharing my notes [just need to see about getting them into a format that doesn't use so much shorthand] and noting what I still need to figure out. [with which having a collaborator would help me out too]

Haha, In that case, sorry, but I had to.

Curious... What's the difference between the EIHL Champion, EIHL Cup Champion, EIHL Grand Slam, EIHL KO Cup Champion and EIHL Playoff Champion? At least Erhardt and Gardiner could replace the Campbell's and Wales conference, but which of those would be closest to the President's [best regular season record]? Also I was mostly curious about what the awards looked like. Other than the Patton Conference, not listed on Elite prospects... ...and your Devils winning the Monteith Bowl a couple years back... can't seem to google-fu a picture of a physical incarnation of an individual player award anywhere.

Thanks for the mentions guys. As an aside, I noted that the description, but not the player award trophies were changed. Was curious what player awards the EIHL actually had, but searches come up empty. Does the EIHL even have physical trophies to hand out? Or do they just have a list on a wall in a head office or something... [a plaque at least?]