von Ozbourne

Time for the third chapter in the World Championship series. The '93 installment ushered in a change for the EA hockey franchise. The IIHF was not a fan of the fighting in the previous games and decided to not renew their licence unless it was removed. EA opted to keep the fighting [and even took the opportunity to make it more brutal with the addition of blood spilling injuries] and continued on without the IIHF licence. This didn't affect the quality of the new game as you know who can't revoke the licence to use their name? Countries. And this time out, EA was able to licence the names of the players representing the national teams of those countries. So 1993 features a name change and part of the reason why I refer to this as the "World Championship Series" [as opposed to just "IIHF" series]. Presenting: International Hockey '93! Game features include: Full rosters for the top 30 teams based on finishing position in the 1993 World Championships including, for the first time, real player names to go with their sweater numbers! [some of which had to be creatively shortened due to spacing constraints. [John Vanbiesbrk sympathizes] Ice surface updated to 1993 markings. [had to change the original centre ice logo containment circle as the lack of ellipse bugged me] Some features were coded in before the IIHF pulled the plug and remained in the finished product, like mentions to the IIHF in the lengthy Ron Barr delivered history lessons on each team. The bottom half of the new "EA World Championship Trophy" might look familiar to savvy fans. The caron on the top of the SEGA "S" might be cheeky reference to a long standing IIHF sponsor. The ability to make players bleed, just not Gretzky, because he's not in this game. The previews: International Hockey 93.bin

Pro Sport Hockey [released in Japan as USA Ice Hockey] is an NHLPA '93-like game developed by TOSE for the NES. Supposedly has more realism regarding plays, but I should note that it did not review well and I haven't looked at it much myself.

Hear that. Madden 93 gets an update or he'll stop believing in God. Actually, in all seriousness, I haven't had much time to figure out Madden myself. Tecmobowl/Super Bowl is alright, but what I really want is a '90s CFL version of Madden. Where might one start to find some resources to help in that? Don't suppose anyone has built an EARE, NOSE and THROTE tool for Madden eh?

Time for IIHF Hockey '92! Released in 1992, this game is the first sequel in the World Championship series and features the top 24 teams based on their final placing in that year's tournaments. Game features include: Based on the NHL Hockey (1991) engine and fills the gap I accidentally left between 1991 [NHL Hockey ©1991] and 1993 [NHLPA Hockey '93 ©1992] oops. [Yeah I forgot that the year indicated the time of playoffs and the Pittsburgh vs Minnesota threw me. I suppose I could have just changed first one I made, but it was already done. And I liked having the Soviets, so why the hell not make both.] So South Korea is out, Australia is in, and to dress up the roster update, [this is '90s EA, not 2010s EA] a number of graphical changes have been made. Also, another shout out to @Jkline3 for the help with the roster numbers. Although it's too bad that the goalie bytes are greyed out in NOSE for this ROM, so any third stringers had to stay home. On to the previews. IIHF Hockey 92.bin

Just noting that I have updated the IIHF 94 ROM with accurate numbers and special thanks to @Jkline3!

Damn that is helpful. I've google translated some sites, Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, German.. but it's definitely harder to find them when your search tends to ignore the non-English ones. As I mentioned, eliteprospects is usually the most complete for information that I can find with most international teams. But even they are missing player numbers for quite a few teams and season stats for the players in lower tier leagues. legendsofhockey.net has an IIHF section that is pretty decent too. Site was built in 1997 and looks like it was never updated since and they stopped adding stats in 2014, but that's not a problem when I'm only concerned with the '90s. Beyond that, I've found some sites that specialize, like the Aussie hockey hall of fame [found some team photos that I used]. Got British team info off a scanned programme page on a UK hockey site after following a link to a Tony Hand article. Got one Ukraine team photo from a retired player's facebook page. Came across a defunct Asia hockey league site... Luckily I like the act of researching, otherwise the quest for any kind of accuracy would drive me insane. I do find quanthockey.com is nice for stats when making player ratings, but I also find it lacking for uniform numbers and when dealing with some lower pool teams. hockey-reference and hockeydb are typically only concerned with the North American pro ranks, and thus all but useless to me, but like you say, typical North Americans don't take as much interest in the international game as I do. I may have to humbly PM you before I post some of my later editions...

That's pretty cool. Although now I'm curious what that would look like if the other faceoff circles were also shrunk to the same size as center ice. Weird how the addition of ads to NHL rink ice always annoyed me, and yet here I am taking an interest in defacing my games. Nothing requiring that they be in a 6x4 arrangement either... Funny, you just reminded me of of how I came across that by accident after a bad counting error led me to paste half a logo off to the side of the ice. My reaction at the time was annoyance, and after going back to a previous save I promptly forgot all about it. Clearly that was the wrong mindset.

Game two in the World Championship Series will be the "first" game. Released in 1991, IIHF Hockey was sort of the North American version of EA Hockey for PAL regions. The major difference however, is that it features the top 24 international teams based on final finishing position [as opposed to the IIHF's four year aggregate ranking system] with rosters from the 1991 World Championships including the last ever Soviet team. [Interestingly enough, it was actually easier to find roster data overall than it was for '94. I only had to improvise on half of Belgium's team numbers] Other features include: Not much as I mainly just gave the original game a complete asset overhaul for the international teams. Given that this was only the third game I'd ever modded, it made things easier to stick to basics. Reinstated the old square crease as the IIHF still used that at the time. Still based player ratings as much as I could on players that were already "featured" in NHL Hockey. I would soon learn that this would mean a lot of players with some very low stats. Couple of Easter eggs in there that might give away my home town, but they shouldn't detract. Not much else to say about this one, so here are some pics. Hope you guys like it. IIHF Hockey (91).bin

Well geez, thanks a lot eh. Where did you find Estonia's numbers though? I have about four sites that I found decent for reference and the best I could do was adapt eliteprospects' stats from 1993. [And if you happen to have Slovakia and Kazahkstan's numbers as well...] I'll repost an updated ROM in a bit.

Alright I said I would start posting these before this year was out and since there is just over 24 hours left, I should probably just do it. Introducing the IIHF Hockey series. The idea was to make each of the NHL(PA) games for Genesis into its contemporary IIHF version. Complete with period correct art style, team assets and players. Ultimately the goal was to make it look like something EA might have released back in the day. Rosters, for the most part, have been taken from each year's World Championships. Some provisions were made in cases where say, some teams only had one goalie, so I borrowed a backup from that year's Olympic roster, or had to improvise some data because apparently no one found it important enough to record what sweater numbers the Estonian National team wore 26 years ago... what the hell eh? I start with IIHF 94. [Full disclosure, this is actually the third version of this game I'd made as the first was a foolish attempt to mod an original NHL94 ROM. Soon after I discovered that 30-team ROMS was a thing and made a second while I was just learning the craft and used an old Blitz league ROM to train on. I found a couple of critical errors, mainly how player cards were set up and some colour palette issues that were in the base ROM. Rather than keep polishing the dorodango, I opted to start over using my improved skills on a clean wboy 30-team ROM. I am much happier with the results] Some features: This game includes the top 30 international teams based on their finishing position after the 1994 World Championships. The Ice surface has been reverted back to its original 1994 goodness. Player ratings were a bit of a contentious issue, I opted to use as many player stats as was available in the original game and basically based everyone else off that. Player cards are almost complete [Who knew that finding 26 year old photos of South Korean hockey players would be almost impossible?] but at least even the "default player" pics are all unique. Many starting line ups were based on who actually had a photo available. No mind was paid to whether teams were in the "A", "B" or "C" pool as far a play offs go. I toyed with the idea of patches like weight bug and helmet sprite, but decided to stick to the default, again for the period correct feel. Might revisit that later. Anyway, here are some previews. Addendum for the series: I'm going to post the "Final Cut" updates here for the entire series as they are reworked. Again, thanks to @EagleXIII for all his help in resolving those nagging anachronisms. IIHF Hockey (91) F4.bin IIHF Hockey 92 F4.bin International Hockey 93 F.bin IIHF 93 F.bin IIHF 94 F.bin IIHF 94 CE F2.bin IIHF 95 F.bin IIHF 95 WCE F.bin IIHF 96 F.bin IIHF 97 F.bin IIHF 98 F.bin IIHF 99.bin OR IIHF 99 - [Widescreen Edition 1.2].bin IIHF 2000 [10AE].bin -

Just remembered something that might help out. Haven't had the chance to see if this would be useful or not, but in NHL Hockey (92) the round crease and the face off circles actually share tiles. This may be more helpful for a guy like me who likes to go with period correct ice markings, but if you go with an un-coloured full semi circle goalie crease (like many Euro-Leagues had in the day), or go with blue backgrounded ice ads for the face off circles (maintaining the current crease shape), you might be able to free up an addition 6 tiles for ad space. If I manage to figure something out with that, I'll post some pics.

Ah yeah that's true. Actually if I remember correctly from my playing around with the Elitserien games, they added something to the code so characters with hex numbers of 01-06 would end up being the upper and lower case versions. (Swedish only has three extra letters Å, Ä and Ö) Barring that, you'd need to adapt six special characters instead, like hyphens and underscores and stuff. (I actually had to do something similar when I was figuring out my IIHF version of NHL96. For some reason the game menu font doesn't have a "Z". But they did have an "X" weirdly enough, so I just changed the sprite and made sure to spell CXech Republic and KaXakhstan in NOSE.) Hmm I think I know where you are going with that. I was actually hoping to adapt some sprites to make something for the four zone face off circles, but the best I could do was to free up four rink tiles. I did make a Skoda logo for the center ice dot using the shared All-Star team logo in '92, but if I could figure out how to have some garish advert in all five circles, that would be amazing.

I like it! Curious, how'd you work the on-ice ad? although, if I may... could use more umlauts.

... Maybe I am. Well, shhh........oot. Now that seemed to be the missing link for me. Although I realized after the fact that I also had some other issues stemming from the fact that I copy pasted groups of tiles from another old 30 team ROM that had some of the wrong players in the top five. [Some featured players were chosen based on having available pics, while they may have actually been on the second or third line skill-wise. Forgot I did that.] Add in some late nights and it just wasn't computing. Luckily I only got six teams in before stepping away. Fresh eyes and mind did push me to quickly make this spread sheet though. All formulas so I'm proud that I didn't do this one the hard way. Even put in the copy text for EARE and hex editor, and figure it can double as a cheat sheet to find any card image so at least it can be handy in that regard.

Thanks for the graph. Actually my problem was the opposite. Using a ROM with two goalies, and adding a third was complicating matters. Luckily the EARE method is fixing the problem, it's just tedious copy/pasting and double checking the data [Like yourself, I have no pre-made references for the 32-team ROM]

For a few minutes there I did feel like an idiot, [although admittedly most of my ROM hacking time over the past year has been spent in the '92, '93, '95 & '96 engines, with which EARE does not get along with, so I forgot most of it's usefulness] But then I tried custom player pictures help file process and remembered how that didn't work so well for me. [worse!] my work around before was to just make sure I just always put the player in the default slot. Yeah I was looking through that before and it didn't seem to address the issue I'm having. The problem isn't so much the player cards but the "featured lineup" names on the main menu screen. The NLC lineup has the correct player names on the "Ron Barr" screen, [although the #1 center is using a default player pic, probably related] but the main menu features a different set of player names. I figured out with the 30-team ROM, that this seemed to be static to which roster slot/hex offset the ROM was set to reference. My work around was to just put my desired player into that slot and move on. Unfortunately with the 32-team ROM, the featured forward group is whatever player names are in the #3-#5 slots. And If I have a team with three goalies, the game doesn't adjust to read #4-6, rather just call up the third string goalie's name with the #1 center's picture. UPDATE: Okay, I did some more playing around and managed to figure out the EARE thing and got it to work for me.... mostly. It just seems that for whatever reason, it reeeeeeeeaaaaaaally doesn't like that short roster in the number one slot and will not play nice no matter what I try. So i just removed it from the list and whadayaknow, it's using the generic pics, but it stopped my freezing issues. I guess at this point I could try adding a couple of black aces and just not put them on a line, or if all else fails, pretend the team missed photo day.

Okay I'm stumped. I know I've come across this before, but it was late in development that time and I didn't feel like rearranging all 30 rosters just to have a nicer player order. BUT! now I'm playing around with a 32 team ROM and most of the rosters have three goalies, so the third stringer is getting featured in place of the third forward. Kind of dumb, but not game breaking. What is game breaking however... I ran into an issue where one of my historically accurate rosters does not have enough players for the second defenceman pointer to actually point at anything. So I'm getting this: and the game freezes. Of course I neglected to copy the information I need over to my references and I can't seem to find it again. Anybody care to point me to what I'm missing in a manner that doesn't make me feel like a complete idiot?

So just a vanilla '95 with Ron instead of John? Actually, since I've already done all of the leg work, I can whip that up in 15 minutes of copy/pasting. I hope it's okay that I did not modify the title or main menu screens with the Hockey Night logo as that is a bit more of a process. NHL 95 HNIC Edition.bin Figure I'd also follow UltraMagnus' tutorial and do a season accurate 56-Game season version. NHL 95 HNIC Edition 56.bin

Huh, well now I know. Although now I'm imagining a scenario where: Game 7 of the Finals. The home team is up by one in the dying minutes. The visitors pull their goalie and press hard, gaining possession in the neutral zone. A stretch pass springs their speedy forward on a partial break, but a home defender hauls him down and the shot attempt is denied as the attacker slides past crashing into the boards! The ref raises his arm on the delayed call. The last seconds on the clock count down and the home crowd erupts! The ref points to center ice. The home team grabs the Cup and starts skating around in literal circles! The tripped player gets up and skates to center ice. The home team takes the Cup back to their dressing room and pops the champagne! The home goalie is told to get back in the net as the visiting forward prepares for a very important penalty shot. The home team starts drinking from the Cup [this was pre-pandemic] and slurring "Weee arrre the Chaaaaampions!" The visiting player skates in and triple dekes the goalie and scores! The game is tied! We're going to overtime! The home team says "Nope!" The ref shrugs and goes to get another doughnut. The visiting team exchanges incredulous looks. A coach is heard to say "This is <redacted>! That was a <redacted> <redacted> call than Brett in '99! The next day the paper reads "Home Team Wins!! Final Score 3-3".

So I was using Demo mode to sim a game in NHL 95 [don't judge] for reasons of AI balancing I won't bother going in to. To the point, as the game was ending, one of the players was on a breakaway and was hooked. The game ends, the three stars are awarded and that was the end.... wait what? The player that got hooked is being awarded a penalty shot? That is really weird. So I watch the inept player spin around a lot and take a feeble backhand from the face off circle that the goalie easily stops, and the game immediately kicks out to the "Continue Season" screen without letting me look at the game stats. While this is a weird occurrence on it's own, what was really a missed opportunity was that it was a one goal game, and the player taking the penalty shot could have tied it up had he scored. I could have used my Player 1 coaching powers to pull the goalie and, if hopefully the AI doesn't miss the net, the game should have gone to overtime. Curious if anyone else might have encountered this.

As a card carrying Nintendo fanboy, I admittedly argued with the Sega kids about how much they sucked for obvious reasons. [we owned a SNES and could not afford to get a Genesis too, so obviously they sucked] But once my brother bought a used Genesis off a buddy, I had to secretly acknowledge that both consoles had their merits and would bounce back and forth between F-Zero and NHLPA '93. Also, since you mentioned it, you knew this was coming.

Nice! Like the new art direction. Curious though. I was actually toying around with your old NHL95 v5 beta pviously. Is this version fundamentally different from that one aside from the obvious rosters and art? Also, if I may note, I encountered new host Kelly Hrudey stating that he was John Shrader. I know I encountered that before and realized that the game had two intros, and I thought one was for regular game and the other for season or playoffs, but now the weird thing is, that I can't replicate it to say what game mode it was in. I checked the hex, so I know I wasn't imagining it, but it's not coming up anymore. so.... never mind?

Nah that's cool. That's part of why I posted the clean translation before I started messing around with it myself. I will offer a warning though, I didn't do anything in regards to the artwork, and I know from editing the NHL versions of 95 and 96 that the logos and team banners, etc, are not as easy to change as with wboy's 94 ROM. The good news though, is that the colour palette and tile ordering code in both games is usually directly after the specific sprite tiles themselves. So once you get familiar how they work, you can edit all of the logos to your liking.

Sure thing.

Sure. PM sent.