von Ozbourne

I'm not sure about the SNES, but if I recall, holding A+C+start and hitting reset on the Genesis will erase all saved data, so something similar to that could work for you. I've also accidentally found that trying to simulate an entire season and then pressing reset when the game explicitly tells you to "DO NOT PRESS RESET !!" will scrub all changes as well. Imagine this would probably happen to all of the games if you were so careless. [and aren't into finger gymnastics]

Nice stuff. Always like to see some appreciation for the old WHA.

I've noticed that all of the NHL games have some art and code assets left over from previous games in the series, [using the previous year's Playoffs logo, having unused Ron Barr Hot/Cold commentary in non-Ron games, build note comments, etc.] but this one was a surprise. Took me a bit to realize what I was looking at, but getting near the end of the ROM data, it appears that while THQ was compiling the Genesis version of NHL 98 they pulled in some Madden assets. And just below that. Almost as interesting, [at least it's the same sport] but the entire title graphic from NHL 97 was left intact. Not the most egregious thing I've heard of getting compiled into a ROM, but it's fun coming across this stuff nonetheless.

Hey don't worry man, we all have to start somewhere. Personally, I trolled the tutorials in this forum for about a year and a half before I was confident enough to start taking part in discussions [and still asking questions] and posting my own ROMs.

This..... really? I am curious, does NHL 96, 97 or 98 work in Classicboy? I guess they would react the same way as they are basically build on the same engine. But the weird part is; those are the least modified as far as the actual ROM goes. Basically just graphical changes like with 92.

Actually I have some ideas that I'm looking to explore in this vein. Nothing decided on how I might do this just yet, but thanks for the interest.

Well there goes my idea....

I've had this happen while demoing a cpu vs cpu a match in NHL95. The kicker was that if the player had scored, it would have resulted in a tie game [and should trigger overtime] Instead, the player went with the lamest of ducks in a backhander from the hash marks, and that was the game. Would have been interesting to see a tying goal, although I have a feeling it would not in fact have triggered an extra frame. The weirdest part was that it didn't even let me look at the game stats afterwards. After the penalty shot was over, it just kicked straight out to the main menu.

Wait, did somebody say 97? Why yes. You read that correctly. Unfortunately I must admit that this was not a very fun project. I never really liked '97 as it just seemed like a lazy copy/paste job of '96, to the point where they didn't even change the year on the playoff bracket, [seriously, go check] and with uglier menu graphics. So unlike '92 to '96, there was no sense of discovery or even an interesting art direction that would allow me to flex my chops. But, the original plan from the start was to make an IIHF version of all of the Genesis NHL games, and by golly I wasn't going to quit now. I will however be skipping the retro review and just post the screen shots. I went with flags over goalie photos mainly to include more teams and make it more international versus player focused. Kept debating if I should change that, let me know what you think eh? soooo much tile renumbering. Finding which palette that Skoda ad used, and making use of a secondary unused one in order to make it green, was a pretty cool find. Finding out that there was a completely unused second palette [with the blue shades being changed to purple!?] was a weird but fortuitous find that conveniently allowed me to make a properly coloured logo and trophy combination. Liked how that part turned out. I was proud of myself for being able to implement all four 16 colour palettes available to me with that congrats screen. In conclusion, I will reference another anticlimactic ending screen... Oh yeah, forgot to note that, like '96, this engine still doesn't support the main menu option in NOSE. So the default match up does not reflect the Finals with Canada vs Sweden. As well as not being able to set the default game options. Add to that the wonky team rankings and season/playoff simmed game performances. [hence Estonia winning the Championship ?] At least exhibition games are fine. IIHF 97.bin

Despite trying to make sure that I was finished with a ROM before posting it, I've come across another that I wasn't quite happy with and made an adjustment to the IIHF 96 presentation. So here's an update. IIHF 96 1.1.bin What is in this update? Just instead of this... ...we get this. The upside is that teams are not only easier to navigate in NOSE, the timeout and shootout/penalty shot screens have something a bit better than "TIMEOUT TEAM" or Shootout TEAM vs TEAM. Came to this conclusion after trying something different in 97 and finding I was unable to use tile or palette editing to avoid making a doubled name bar. Figured that having the three letter ISO code in there was the lesser evil considering all instances.

Surprised that no one mentioned to the original poster that the lack of fighting in '94 had nothing to do with angry moms, [who seemed to have no problem with buying their kids Mortal Kombat back in the day] but it was the NHL who leveraged their support on presenting a "cleaner image" of their league. Although I'm curious if it is possible to figure this out. I know from poking around that pretty much all of the Genesis games have some bits of legacy code from a previous installment. Although I feel that it may be easier [which is a relative term] to program the one-timer into 93.

I had questions myself until I saw the original post date. Although I'd thought that this vernacular was discontinued by the end of the '90s.

Ah nice. All the more reason to make a mod of the original despite the lesser number of teams I suppose. Additional heads up. I have replaced 95 WCE with a final fixed version [thanks to kingraph for helping me realize that it was a really simple fix]. Now all 34 teams have proper team overall ratings.

Huh, actually that was pretty easy. If anyone else is interested, all I did was: 1) go to 0A06BA and change 000A 06DC to 001D ADA0. [it was in a free area and seemed like a fun word] 2) go to 0A06CA and change 000A 06FA to 001D ADD0. [even funner] 3) go to 1DADA0 and enter in 34 pairs of random numbers. [You may wish to use a hex calculator to convert a dec number out of 99 to hex for some more specific numbers] 4) go to 1DADD0 and enter in 34 pairs of numbers that two or three values higher than the first set. 5) save as, and you're done. I can post the updated ROM if anyone is interested. I will leave it to Ultramagnus if he deems it fit to add to his guide.

I accept your challenge good sir. Actually I think I may have stumbled upon the reason for that. Following kingraph's notes the team rating are supposed to start at offset 0A06DC, but my game seems to want to use the set starting at offset 0A06FA. The pointer at 0A06BA directs to 0A06DC, but again my game is using the pointer at 0A06CA which, as it turns out, is 0A06FA. The numbers are slightly different starting at those two points, but they seem close enough that they could very well be a high/low range.

Just updating the IIHF 95 ROMs since I finally managed to fix the team rating numbers [for the most part]. Many many thanks to @kingraph for the assist on that one. The caveat however is that this will only fix the pregame rating as told by Mr. MacLean. The ratings used for season simmed game performance is stored somewhere else. Don't be surprised to see Estonia [formerly Detroit] and Japan [Rangers] overachieving their butts off in the standings. IIHF 95 1.2.bin IIHF 95 WCE 1.3.bin

Just a follow up. Turns out the 34 team ROM works the same for me [start at offset 0A06FA instead of 0A06DC] Those six extra teams seem to be referencing something else, but that isn't dissimilar from the player photos and roster data. Teams #31 and #34 are the only ones with really messed up ratings so I'm not overly concerned given the circumstances. On a side note; After changing the ratings, I noticed that the season mode seems to take it's cues from somewhere else entirely. As evidenced by, well this... 24th ranked Estonia kicking ass in that division?! [Estonia is the team formerly known as Detroit]

Thanks a lot! Actually now that you mention it, I haven't gotten an Everdrive myself yet, but does the original NHLPA 93 works alright on one? I've been looking into making a hack of the original, as opposed to using the 30/32 team mods. [seems silly, but I like the spinning logo splash screen] Wouldn't be until I'm done some others I already have on the go, but I'm curious if that will work any better.

This is so weird. That was what I thought from your hex notes, but it wasn't working, until... I tried editing a clean original 28 team ROM and in editing the first 28 pairs of digits it finally worked! BUT, copy/pasta those hex values over to my IIHF 28 Team ROM... nothing. Still the old ratings. But on a hunch I noted that there was enough data between those 56 numbers and the start of the pregame preamble and that they were divided by identical 6363 hex values. So I punched in a bunch of 1s to see what it might do [it was nothing] and pasted in my new numbers into the second section. Lo and behold that did it. [Of course I copy paste my new data back into the original ROM and every team has a rating of 17, because 11 in hex, what the hell...] No idea why it would do that how that pointer got changed, as my ROM was based on the original one [haven't looked at the 34 team one yet] but I suppose as the developer adage goes; if it works, that's good enough. Pro tip for any other interested parties: DO NOT touch the 6363s. It will break stuff.

Alright, if I may @UltraMagnus , as a preeminent expert on NHL 95 around here, I am compelled to ask. How the hell are the team overall ratings determined? Long long story short, I've broken a lot of things in my experimentation, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get that number to change. [which is kind of dumb as the game includes built in create-a-player and roster editing functions. I can have a team stacked with 90+ ringers vs an AHL squad and the team ratings still won't reflect that] The step-by-step only shows the pointer, but changing that [even to just hide the number] doesn't seem to have any effect, too bad EARE just crashes if you try to open anything but a 94 ROM, and messing around with the team hex data like with NHLPA 93, doesn't seem to hold the key either. I'm right bloody stumped.

Just in case @DeterminedApathy was asking in the other way, [and this actually applies to my interests as well] does "limited" refer to both more and less than 26? I am curious as in theory, because of the way '95s season mode is set up, one might simply create a calendar that omits one or more teams? The initial issue that comes to mind however is how the standings/team/player stats will get handled for the removed teams.

Dude! Thanks for this. Oh... so many ideas. So few hours in a day...

Well how about that. Weird that should be what makes it work, but there we are.

Yeah the problem here is that It's not even getting through the "Press 1 to generate images" step. Used a .bmp that I had already resized. Used the sample pic in the folder. Used a giant .jpg file just to see what happens. Same result every time. File size: 0. Crash. I mean I can just keep using photoshop, just the issue there is that even when I make an index coloured file where I manually enter and match the rgb values in the colour palettes, the way tile molester and photoshop process colours usually means that fine shading detail will get lost if two shades are deemed to close to each other.

Yeah that's the thing. It's literally the sample .bmp file that was included in the zip folder with the Ditherer.exe file. Properties says it's 169kb. I was able to open it in photoshop, so I know it isn't corrupt. Unless that is just too small? Rounding down to the closest Mb? But it's not like you're going to get a very big file when you're dealing with so few pixels anyway... But yeah, not giving me much to go on.