von Ozbourne

I can say that there is an update in the works. But we have been a bit busy as of late so I don't want to give out a specific release date that we won't be able to meet. Soon-ish we hope though.

Actually that hadn't crossed my mind, but just last week I came across some old posts about season mode games and also some old notes I made regarding the divisional alignments that I'd apparently forgotten about. The thing with that type of team exchange is that [apart from taking some time to do] the team ratings, as far as simulated games go, are linked to where in the order a team falls and nothing to do with the team rankings or the player skill ratings. So the drawback to this would be that real-life-eventual-champs Colorado would be a playoffs bubble team, while we're-in-a-down-period Toronto would make the finals 50% of the time in a straight simulated season. Besides, I double checked and Toronto actually didn't move to the East until 1998 when Nashville joined. I was however reminded that I could realign the teams in less time than it took me to type this message, by simply relocating Colorado's team number in the section of code that sets the division and conference setting. And changing the numbers that set the division and conference set up. So Colorado is still in the "Q" spot in the team selection menu, but apart from that it works. So goodbye N.East Hello Pacific. updated in the original post

As one of the very few people on here who has dug into all ten of the Genesis/MegaDrive variants of EA's NHL games, I get that sometimes it's interesting to look into those other games and it doesn't need to be a "this or that" situation when a "this and that" scenario is perfectly acceptable. But, as one of those people, I also get that while the 96-98 games aren't bad, they do show how EA was starting their way to getting overly complex and they lack the balance of skill and simplicity that made '94 so much fun. I might also mention that, having spent some time editing each game, while '93, '94 and '95 have been cracked open and have expanded editable ROMs that are pretty easy to edit with the help of all the tutorials and resources on this site, the fact is that modding '96, '97 and '98 is limited to the original ROM making them not quite as versatile. Another drawback is that like '95 based mods, there is a season mode option, but it only works for the first 26 teams. However unlike the modified 34-team NHL'95 ROM, NHL'98 only has 26 regular teams and five All-Star teams. So any modern mods will mean omitting one current NHL team. I will say that there are the EA/THQ "secret teams" but the only hack I know about those is how to make them take the place of the default East/West All-Star teams. Maybe it might be possible to hack that part and have all 33 pre-loaded teams be accessible at the same time, but I'm just an art guy and that stuff's above my pay grade. Anyway, don't mean to get too far into it, but add in that the information on these games is not quite as robust and that, in its current state, any hacks are simply more labourious out of the gate, it's not really making one feel incentivized to put in the effort for a game that will be even more niche than your typical NHL'94 based mod.

Well shucks. I guess to your point @kooties8 I had done a series of mods and mentioned that I was trying to figure this out, but I suppose being based on '96-'98, it didn't garner as much interest. Or perhaps I should have taken your tact and posted a separate question. It actually annoys me that I had the right idea, but was searching for the ratings in the wrong listing order [looking vertically instead of horizontally I might call it] I am still curious though if these numbers will have any relation to a team's performance in a simulated season mode. Just to keep this in the same place, I was able to use slapshot's pattern to figure out where '96 keeps its team ranking data. NHL 96 00012016 - EVEN STRENGTH 00012046 - POWER PLAY 00012076 - PENALTY KILLING 000120A6 - GOALTENDING 000120D6 - OVERALL and the Swedish PAL port Elitserien 96 0000FDF6 - EVEN STRENGTH 0000FE24 - POWER PLAY 0000FE52 - PENALTY KILLING 0000FE80 - GOALTENDING 0000FEAE - OVERALL

Obviously not going to be that helpful, but I figured I'd weigh in for the dual purpose of saying you're not alone in appreciating '96-'98 for what they are. [although admittedly I do still prefer '94 & '95] Also I've tried digging into the ratings, and while I was able to find out a few things about how ratings are used, the numbers remain impenetrable. Annoyingly they seem to be linked to the numbered order rather than a specific team, as it is possible to change the selection order of the teams, but that overall rating for the fifth team is always going to show up for the fifth team regardless of what team is in that slot. Also simulated season performance in '98, more so than '96 or '97, seems to be a separate thing and has no relation to the ranking of the teams or the ratings of the players on those teams. It also doesn't seem to follow the same pattern as '93-'95 do, so that's no help. Eventually I had to give up and just took the piss out of the now meaningless numbers. Screen shot from a '97 based mod, but you get the idea.

Yeah I realized that I originally misread the notes thinking that 84 was related to the 160 points bit and when I realized that mistake, I had already found out that changing the number was doing all sorts of other weird things. The unfortunate part is that all of this testing was conducted on a ROM where I also also had RNG on some heavy steroids, so Hot/Cold and checking boosts were pretty extreme. While the tests were consistent with themselves, I don't know how useful the findings will be on regular humans.

Had a few minutes to try something else out and realized that This might not work in my context. While as previously mentioned, changing the value at 0x14410 from 84 to 34 will make every check of the puck carrier into an injury inducing hit, even after the whistle, Changing it to 74 apparently means that most hits will result in a penalty, even after the whistle.

I've been kind of curious to see if this could be manipulated in a manner in which one might guarantee one to two injuries per period and came across some interesting patterns I figured I might as well share. To reference @chaos 's point that the bits at 0x14410 influence the results of a check, and by default is 0084, I noted that changing only the last digit, I was getting some drastically different results. Like such: [tested with 5 min periods] 00X8 = An especially big hit resulted in the game soft locking with the clock stopping but I could still skate around indefinitely. [I was able to initiate a line change and press the matter, but the following penalty bench screen started a full screen glitch, even though the game was still playable] 00X6 = I did get one game injury, but the ref seemed to think everything was a penalty. 0084 = default 00X2 = not that different, caused two injuries and both were for the game 00X0 = All hits to the puck carrier resulted in the ref blowing the play dead like it were an icing or offside. Odd numbers resulted in game crashes with Illegal Instruction errors. Not sure how any of this helps, beyond I guess only editing the first digit. Should also add a qualifier that I tested this on a version of the game where, we'll say a Scott Stevens type would be one of the softer players on the team.

Oh. Uh. Yeah. Sorry man. That was just a mock up I made for the head canon behind making an IIHF 2000 ROM that was was a mod based off the PS2 remaster of NHL 94 that was included in NHL06. I toyed with the idea of making a mod based on a PlayStation ROM or more likely a PC version, but kind of lack the tools and knowledge base to pull it off.

Curious about this. Sounds like you might be trying out @AdamCatalyst 's ROM? Not sure if you are trying to patch the 2025 ROM, or update the 2024 ROM with the 2025 patch. I know I've had errors when I accidentally tried to do the latter, but if it's the former, I think he recently released a new update for 2025, not sure if his latest patch matches the roster changes though, so some of those details could cause some issues when the patch is comparing data changes.

Oh boy.... The potential.... for misuse... Although, on the interesting side, don't get to see this too often. Funny enough, this is not the first time I've seen this. Back in the day on the original hardware, I found out that if you have almost your entire team in the penalty box, the game will throw the backup goalies on the ice just to fill in for not having enough players. Ken Wregget was clearly not used to being on the wing and was caught with his head down. Disappointingly, I should note that you can't pull the Base Wars technique of winning a game by forfeit after taking out too many of the opponent's players. Seems that once you get down to a combined six live bodies on the ice and/or in the penalty box, injuring more players will apparently just result in the team doctors giving the oldest injured guy some morphine and tape and sending him back out there.

All this cool talk about new found knowledge and... Is it just me wondering if I can exploit this to make the CPU controlled players even more likely to throw the body?

First? That's what the leet innerwebs kids say right? Just have to say that at risk of sounding like a plant and a cheerleader, this patch amazing and worked perfectly. Except for the fact that it didn't compensate for the four letter names I used in my WWF mod. 0/10. But since you were nice enough to include all of the offsets for manual editing, I didn't need to track those down in my notes and was able to quickly edit the hex value to move the score numbers over by one tile, thus redeeming yourself. A/7 I also liked that you included an add-on for less lateral camera movement. Haven't tried "minimal", but "less" seemed just right compared to the default of "lots". Þ/π

Ah, if only that could work for the real Canadian team... Although, at risk of making a soon to be dated comment, after that Latvia game, the real test starts tonight. I haven't had a chance to examine this, but after watching some of the other games, you really can see how the local fans get behind teams like the underdog Latvians or how the crowd went nuts cheering for Finland [perhaps also against the U.S.] Any thoughts on giving some teams a bump in this regard?

Sadly I so frequently play [or play test] with the sound off that I had to reassure myself that I wasn't wrong in thinking that there was a chime that signalled a penalty expiring. While it might be interesting to commandeer that signal to also trigger a chime when the game clock reached 1:00 in a period, but that's definitely beyond my scope. I guess I could recommend that if you wanted a chime at the one minute mark, just get a penalty at the three minute mark and you should be good right?

Curious about this. I understand the graphical changes, but is the gameplay different enough that it would be a different enough experience compared to the original game? The other question would be what to do with the additional teams in that case. Other than maybe adding All-Star teams and a '94 Canada Cup that never happened maybe...

I tried it out. Worked seamlessly for me. Only issues were that I needed to download a different patching program after realizing that it was in .bps as opposed to .ips format, and that I don't like to read apparently since I initially got an error that reminded me that you specifically pointed out that this was a patch for the Original game, so obviously it won't translate to the expanded 32-Team version you dumbass.

Good to know. One less thing on my plate at least. Unfortunately I have hit a wall with the saving issue in this particular ROM and have to assume that it got baked in somewhere within the two years of iterating. And then personal bias and a small base of feedback means that these become foundational things that don't get noticed until you have a big tower on top that is leaning ever so slightly to the right. Funny thing is that part of my brain is wondering why I would blow it all up just to figure out how to fix a feature that I never use! Are you going to take time away from these other things you're doing to deal with this? But then the other part is pointing out how much I enjoy fixing things and learning in general is fun and this just might be the incentive needed to revisit a couple of other things that I was debating changing and/or cleaning up anyway, so why not? Just means that it might be a while for all that. But on the bright side, the next update might be compatible with this new widescreen mod? So that could be exciting.

Off the top of my head I will say that some of this can be addressed easily enough, I'll DM you back on Discord with some details. Some of it may take some digging. I have concluded that the line saving is related to the freeze bug fix, but I've realized that there might be some other residual issues from the other mods I've applied to the ROM because even after reversing the fix, the loading function only works properly for the 1st/NLC line. I did find one option that seems to stop the freezing issue, and seems to allow for that top line saving, but I haven't tested it fully and the drawback is that Washington's player roll call looks like this. The 5-minute major is an interesting point as it is just based on the original game's 2-minute "injury" Roughing penalty, so it is beholden to the rules of a minor, but now I'm wondering if there might not be a way to take whatever rule in the code that governs how the [unused] 5-minute fighting major operates, and apply it to a 5-minute "misconduct" type penalty, with a minor/double minor being served by a second player for the actual penalty kill. [what used to be the instigator] @AdamCatalyst? @smozoma? anyone? I will say that in my case, I normally play 10min periods so the major isn't as punitive. I'm curious if the savestate thing is just a matter of how the code interacts with the web thing. Since the major was changed from what used to be just another minor, I'm wondering if there is just something hard coded into how that is interpreted, but without knowing more I can't point a finger at any one thing. Although if the penalties are reduced to 1-minute, I'd be curious if they still show up as the same when uploaded.

Trust your instinct. The gist is that thing was broken. I tried the thing that fixed that thing, but it broke a different thing. So I tried a another thing that fixed that different thing, but broke another thing. Since apparently we can't have nice things and something needs to be broken, I'm just backing away slowly with my hands clearly visible so as not to be responsible for any fatal explosions.

heh, I noted that too. Thought it was a mouse pad, but the dimensions seem off.

Sadly it would appear that you are. I double checked on one of Slapshot and Skip's OG 32-team conversions and the load saved line function seems to work as it should. However I tried saving a line on a pair of 32-Team ROM that I did nothing to except applying two different Winnipeg Freeze Bug fixes, and in both cases I tried to save a line edit but then the Load option just doesn't come up. So at this point my hypothesis is that the thing that the Freeze Bug fix does to memory in regard to how it handles player stats and records, also affects how player line edits are remembered. I have to say, if that's actually the case, I'm going to take stability over convenience. Interestingly, I was able to revert the ROM back to an "unfixed" version, but actually found out that there is a way to not have the game display the glitched data, simply by leaving the lines blank. Initially I left it so all the lines were blank and the player photos came up on the menu screen with no names. And then I activated only the first line, so the player names came up, but no additional info. This seemed to work fine actually, and when I saved a line, the Load option was available again and it worked. Sort of. The caveat is that this edit only seems to work out okay if you are playing with line changes off, since only the First line is recalled as you saved it. The Second and Third lines did some weird bits where, in my test case, I swapped Edmonton's First and Second lines, but when I reverted to default and then loaded the saved lines again, Draisaitl was Ironmanning it on all three lines. So, I guess this might be a patch idea? If loading saved lines is really important and you only ever play with no line changes. Possible this might need further examination to see what's going on here.

You're looking at the TV, I'm going "Hey cool a Rocketeer poster." ...and maybe started humming George Sanger's excellent NES soundtrack. Totally not trying to throw shade.

Ah that pic link is broken. The lines thing is a bit of a weird one. I do wonder if it has something to do with a player card fix. I know when the Winnipeg Crash bug was being addressed, a couple of the fixes had unintended consequences. One in particular seemed to cause the game to forget a fair chunk of data such as if you were playing Playoff mode, after completing a game, trying to Continue Playoffs, would result in the Playoffs being reset to game one of a best of seven of the first playoff bracket option in the list. I can't say for certain, but I'm wondering if this is an age old issue of fix one thing, and find out later that it broke something else.

Now I am stumped. I did a quick test, turned Icing and Off-sides into minor infractions, got about eight guys crammed into the boxes for both teams, and they all were set free with no problem. So... making shrug gesture. I will however be putting that collision update in the main post to address the blowing through the net thing. And might as well list the other hacks included to clear up some other questions. NHL 2025 - Retro 94 Edition v2.1.bin