von Ozbourne

Clearing out another older one. Not sure how much interest this one will garner, but here's an idea I had when I saw the 32 team NHLPA'93 ROM. The back story: The old professional Western Hockey League [1952-1974] evolved from the third incarnation of the Pacific Coast Hockey League. They competed for the Lester Patrick Cup and were considered the west coast's version of the AHL. [although basically treated as a step below by the NHL] They were a place to play for guys on the way up [Glenn Hall], guys "past their prime" [Andy Bathgate], guys who were stars out west, but had varying degrees of luck cracking NHL lineups in the Original 6 days [Andy Hebenton, Guyle Fielder or if you prefer, Don Cherry, who won a championship with Vancouver]. They even partnered up with the first [successful] pro-hockey player's union. Anyway, the hope was to one day turn into a major pro league, possibly even revive the East/West competition for the Stanley Cup like up until 1926. These hopes were dashed as Los Angeles, San Francisco and later Vancouver jumped to the NHL, the WHA raided their players [and later took on the Phoenix and Denver teams] and the league was eventually forced to throw in the towel. But what if they didn't? What if the NHL took the WHA threat more seriously and formed a better partnership with the WHL? This is the result of that thought experiment. Mostly I just rearranged the playoff team brackets and added the lore to the pre-game. WHLvsNHL19.bin

Oh... now you tell me. <looks over at 7.5 ROMs worth of customized ratings> Nope, not changing it. Really? Nope. It's fine. But... Really? ...maybe I can take a look just in case. There you go! i hate you...

Figure I've been using this resource long enough over the past year and a half that I should start sharing some work. While I've been concurrently working on mods of all of the Genesis hockey games produced by EA, [except for Mutant League, but who knows what the future will bring] I haven't revisited this one in about eight months, so I guess it's considered done. Introducing: TRON Turbo Hockey Developed by Kevin Flynn Published by ENCOM Annexed 9/22 by E. Dillinger Features: Based on EA Hockey (1991) for PAL regions. The "Turbo mode" is achieved by playing the game on NTSC settings. The cool part is that playing the 50 Hz game on a 60 Hz setting not only increases the frame rate by 20%, but it also affects the physics in a way where players are faster, shots harder and body checks more brutal. [There may, will be more fights if you are as addicted to that C button as I am] "Awesome" '80s computer aesthetics. Full of futuristic grids and computer font goodness. TRON style game grid and player uniforms. Not the most contrasting, but it fits the style and can be followed well enough. Team names started with Alpha and Beta because, you know, programming, and just kind of stuck with the Greek alphabet motif throughout the modding process. Might change it if a better idea comes up, but it seems to fit. [Also I just really liked Team (Kenny) Omega]. UPDATE 2: This update includes forth option for period lengths unlocked, updated bench player sprites and updated "off-screen player pointer" and "active player stars" in addition to a couple other sprite fixes for in-game and presentation assets that I didn't know how to correct at the time I released the original. As well as the edit that allows teams #25 and #26 [the former All-Star teams] to be used in Playoff mode. TRON Hockey v1.2.bin

Still putting the finishing touches on these, but when I saw this, I couldn't help but want to show a teaser of my '95 rom. Even made sure to find a period correct photo from the mid-'90s.

Damn, this is cool. Although admittedly I really want a way to hack the old Madden games, this will be something I'd like to try. I do have one question though, Is there a way to reduce the number of teams? What really interests me is making a CFL version.

Hey I don't know if you are still looking for the logos but I've been working on this one for a while and was able to map most of the game data. Sorry I don't have usable images yet but here's the offset numbers you can search for. First thing to note is that there are three sizes of logos 4x3, 3x3 & 4x2 [Montreal] I found the first logo is at offset 53696. This is followed by all of the 4x3 logos. The 3x3 logos start at offset 55616. And the lone 4x2 logo is at offset 5FB16. Import the colour palette with offset 467160, size 64. The logo colours will be using the second palette. Don't edit the colours though as I didn't confirm if they actually use that palette as the engine tends to repeat colour info multiple times and the programmers had a habit of referencing the same palette offset for multiple assets. *Note that the clock logo and ice logo share the same sprites* Also, and this is key, unlike later games, I've found that the logos are assembled in a vertical manner rather than horizontally, so I found that you are better off setting your tile program at a 1x12 window size. [since most logos are three tiles vertically, four horizontally, with a few 3x3 and lonely Montreal at two vertically x four horizontally] Hope that helps. I have been working on a series of '91 to '96 mods concurrently and made some wboy-like help guides for myself, but they are not really clean enough to post just yet. Maybe if there is enough interest I'll fix them up so they can be followed by someone other than myself.

So I've embarked on a project to map out and hack every SEGA Genesis NHL game [92-98] and have run into a problem that I can't figure out. Similar to NHL 95, the Team Ratings in NHL 96 are obviously... somewhere... in the code, but I can't seem to locate it. [or 95's for that matter] '96 also has the Even-Strength, Power-Play, Penalty Kill, Goaltending as well as Overall ranking in the team select screen, but given that something like EARE doesn't work with any game other than '94, how I may edit these has eluded me. This is basically the only thing I have left to figure out [other than some of the menu background colour palette references seem a little wonky, but that's not a priority, and adding extra teams is well above my pay grade] and would really appreciate any assistance from anyone smarter than I in the matter.

Realize that this is a bit old of a thread, but for anyone looking this up in the future, the reason that this is true, is because EA Hockey, being PAL, plays at 50Hz. And if your emulator is defaulting to the NTSC 60hz setting, you get a 20% speed boost. The cool part is this seems to affect the physics as well, and if you get a guy with good speed and checking, you can just demolish guys. The downside [or upside, depending] is that the extra-crushing hits seems to will trigger fights a lot easier.

I was thinking to suggest the 'Hawks "Pony" line or the Maroons "S" line, but I gather that including a third or defunct team was not the intent. Although I like that you were able to keep the older ice markings with helmet/stick patches. Now if I can just figure out how to adapt this to my full roster with player cards International team ROM....