Drezz

To add to this topic of backgrounds, an 8x8 decompressed graphic to replace the EA Sports one can be done. I did it in the same manner as the I did the background for the main menu. The limiting issue seems to be graphic memory, so it can't be too complex. Found that out when testing it on the matchups screen and the portraits began cycling through and Ron Barr text was on screen

Did they have FAC0 numbers?

If you use the NHL View tool, look in the View roster data tab and there is usually a section that has a Player Face number. Even if it is a few years after 1999, the game usually had extra cyberfaces it kept in the graphic archive. Just match the numbers to the cyberfaces you have there... unless you already figured all this out already LOL

Yes - I believe they have to be .asf files, created from their proprietary Dittie Importer. But they should play if they are in the correct folder and your sound options have indicated that you want imported music to play along with the ingame music. I haven't played 2003 since... 2003 so my memory is fuzzy.

Makes sense - the banners + Stanley Cup are probably treated as sprites since they need to change, so you can't make those overly huge. The background image tile (green + beveled line) might be editable to a larger size though. Not sure if this is common knowledge around here or not, so apologies for the "lesson" if the bigger brains have already explained this previously Sega graphics have 4 graphic modes in layers Background A + B Window Sprites I'm sure you know most of the graphics like banners and player photos are treated like sprites. Some of the emulators with debuggers have an option to filter between all the VDP layers. Thats how I found out the buggy areas on my screens above were sprite related. I am still figuring out how the game discerns which layer is which, so you don't have those weird glitchy effects.

One of the things on my list "to attempt" is reintroducing the descriptions into 94. They're in the CD version and really in-depth, so I wonder if there's a clue in there! I'm liking this concept of "generic" Sega hockey - an unlicensed, unbranded version of a great sports game. Nice touch!

That rink is awesome! I love the creativity with this series. Have you considered putting a toque on the bald guy in the stands in the scoreboard menu screen?

I think it could work. In the 30 team 94 ROM, I added it to the tail end of the code and there was still quite a bit of room left over in the 2MB version. I believe you could essentially do the same thing in 95 unless there is some weird issue with available RAM. I had to slightly increase the amount of tiles to accommodate the player cards coming through, so I suspect this would be the case for 95.

For those curious - before I post up a fancy tutorial with pics, I'll just explain here quickly. It's literally four steps. 1) Copy the data from an existing full screen BG that wboy created that appears at the start of the game, and place it after all the data in a location of your choosing. 2) Edit the number of header tiles - there's a slight tweak = I used 480 [1152 tiles] instead of 461. 3) Change the pointer to the new location (search for the offset number for the old rink background header in the code) 4) Insert your image and update your palette. Once you do it and get it to work, I guarantee you're going to think "Man, I wish I would have thought of that sooner."

Okay! PROGRESSSSSSS.... I figured out the background issue! I'm hoping it doesn't cause any "other" problems, but so far it looks pretty good. The artifacts are gone, and everything seems to work as it should. I'm going to test it out a bit further before I give a tutorial on how I did it. It's actually WAY easier than you'd think.

So using the decompression method you explained in your thread, I found out where the pointer was for the background graphic and sent it to an unused portion of the ROM (after the roster data/cards). Then I copied the data for one of wboy's 320x224 intro screens, including the header, graphics, palette, and tile layout and pasted it at the offset I chose. Ran the game, and the background appeared as shown above - palette was completely off, but that was easily fixable. I've isolated it to a layering issue. There's something screwy going on with stray sprite data appearing at random. If I run the game and turn the sprite layer off using the VDP Layer select in Regen, it works perfectly. Turn the sprites back on, and the glitchy graphics appear.

Good question about the potential memory issues. I'm going to backtrack and try it on a clean ROM and I'll get back to you on that. After checking the VDP in Regen, I don't immediately see the overwritten areas, but it doesn't mean it didn't happen. EDIT: Still the same errors. I also tried sending the pointer to a different full screen BG like the startup title screen and the same issues happen with the artifacts.

Yes - The first image is indicative of how the screen looks before the cards start scrolling. The team logos and all the text is fine. The glitchy graphics only appear when some of the player cards are scrolling by, and you can see pieces of team logos or stray tiles at different locations on the screen as each portrait appears. I have a feeling it has something to do with the order of each graphic instance that wboy set up, since the portraits are at the very end and all of his full screen background images are near the start of his "reordered" ROM.

Hey folks, I've been quietly practicing with my ROM hacking here and there - trying out small hacks on my own, figuring out how things work and delving deeper into more complex things like pointers, tables, decompressing graphics etc. I finally figured out how to insert an image to take the place of the tiled rink graphic in NHL 94. Using @clockwise NHL 91 mod as a study guide, notes provided by @wboy and @kingraph 's Decompressing Graphics guide, I muddled my way through several attempts to place a background on the main menu screen until I got to this point. As you can see in the first image, a full 320x224 background image can be done! But in the second image, there seems to be an issue when the player cards appear (green circles). I am going to try a different approach and see if I can push the starting offset of the player cards to a spot after the main menu BG to see if these graphical errors disappear. So far so good - it looks promising. Fingers crossed. I'll update this thread with some more info soon.

The button on the controller might be the easiest since it would be more of a physical connection and less prone to bugs if you were hacking the ROM. You'd have to use a 6 button though.

Don't bother. The NHL 2001 db was an oddball and by the time Artem (creator of NHLView) figured out how to recompile the segmented data, NHL 2002 came out - so efforts went into reading the 2002 database. From what I recall, I think you had to do a workaround by going backwards 2000 to 99 or something like that, and then going forward 99 to 2001. The problem was, some data gets dropped so it's not the best solution. Those converter scripts were also user created, so if there isn't one, it was never made.

I miss the days of hockey gaming when it was 2K vs EA. The biggest asset to EA was the PC game modding. The only reason the community was so much bigger was due to that. I honestly feel that if 2K sports made a PC port, that it would probably have forced EA to push the "next gen" version (in 2008) to PC. But they had no competition so they left PC gamers with a dead-ass version after 2005. I used to mod the crap out of those games. Sometimes when I feel the urge, I'll whip something up for NHL 2001 and throw it in for fun just to see if I've still got the skills.

So I was able to add a team (Nashville) into the db as well as some fictional players to take up slots to get to 27 teams + the 2 all star teams. Only problem is, the game doesn't recognize the team. The players are all valid, have their own addresses in the db's and such, so if you put them on other teams they appear. My limited hacking ability has reached its end - I tried adding entries into the EXE but that buggers it up and causes it to crash before starting up. If anyone with better understanding of hex editing and EXE decompiling or reverse engineering wants to take a stab at it, all I did was copy/paste entries from the db in a hex editor, add them to the end of the file and renamed them using NHLINFO.

I had heard about the whites being homes and roads being dark again this year. I hope thats the case, since thats how I was weaned when I first watched hockey. I always attributed to the "good guys wear white" when you're at home. I didn't have a chance to do any more work to this - this month is pretty hectic since I'm getting hitched in 3 weeks, so the bride and master chief has me running all over. I'm looking to have something before the fall. So any updates will be sporadic. I did find out why things weren't working earlier - I was using Mack's NHL07 hack as a start, and it did not respond well to change. Maybe that was the problem from the start - using wboy's fresh 30 team hack, it works fine. Anyhoo - more updates will come when I get the chance.

Ok - here's what I've got so far. Its still WIP, so the next step is to add a strip to the bottom of the jersey, socks, and numbers. After that, a chest and shoulder logo and a few other tweaks.

You know what I just realized as I was filling in stripes - the league will be switching to the edge jerseys, so a lot of the designs may not be relevant anymore, and as I was testing out the sprites minus the stripes, thats when I noticed how much they resemble the new look jerseys. Interesting. Screens to follow shortly.

Ok - I managed to separate the shoulder trim color without any major hiccups. I guess doing too many changes at once isnt a good thing. The players look noticeably better without the additional stripe.

Yeah - that was going to be my last ditch attempt. I was actually thinking of doing the changes in the pallette referenced one and pasting it over in the non referenced one and saving it. I'm pretty sure it is a pallette based problem, since all the other things load up - just not the player anims. I guess you can't save it with a new pallette loaded in or it gets all screwed up somehow. I'm just frustrated because I know it can be done. I dont know why I can't...

Argh. This is ridiculous. If I edit the file in any way (alter pixels on the sprites) everything disappears. I can't make any changes this way, so it looks like my project = FAILED and over.

Man, I haven't felt like such a noob since I first started editing textures for NHL 2000. Ok - here's what I've been doing. Maybe someone can point out what I'm doing wrong in this process. 1) Open the bin file in TM. 2) Set the codec to 4bpp linear. 3) Set the block size to 1 column, 4 rows. 4) Import an internal pallette (in this case Calgary 01955510) size 16, set the byte order to Motorola, 9 bgr Genesis. 5) Start editing my files. 6) Save file (edit.bin) 7) Load bin in Gens. And the players disappear. I spent a whole wack of time editing players and it makes the players disappear. Is it a palette error? Or what have I done wrong in the process. Any help would be appreciated, as I'm really getting tired of this happening in both TM and TLP. Thanks.