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!

On 11/13/2022 at 5:40 AM, seamor said:

Hello (again). 3.0 is live now.

• Outdoor Rink is set up, with lots of details I enjoy. There have been a few outdoor rink templates (including my own), but this is in my opinion the truest look. The glass is "transparent" and the lighting is ever so slightly tinted yellow to give a sunshine/stadium lighting effect.
• The scoreboard is snowy, the splash screen is Soldier Field, and teams that I have seen wear alternate uniforms outside receive updates to wear those jerseys. A few football inspired uniforms too.
• Bugs have been tracked and fixed.

 

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? 

15 hours ago, UltraMagnus said:

Would be cool if we can do that in 95. @von Ozbourme @kingraph is this something that can be done?

 

9 hours ago, kingraph said:

At the very least you can change the background the same way @Drezzmentioned, however increasing tiles is TBD.  It could be possible, but once you increase an image size then you may run into space limitations on the graphics.  

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.

For the time being edit the sprites with no pallet loaded at all - since this seems to be the issue at hand. Didn't bother loading one when doing the sticks, checking animations, or eyes.

If you have trouble identifying the tiles: open two roms simultaneously, load a pallet in one as a refrence, and the other for editing.

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.

That's a great idea. It's going to be heck of a lot work though. the small modification to the jerseys took me few weeks and 30-40 hours of work totally, and all I did was repaint some colors with different ones and went through all the tiles twice.

I did it in TLP, maybe tile molester could work faster if all the player positions are predefined without having to put the tiles all together for every position like I did.

One thing I would like to see is to be able to have different helmet color. Like for example montreal canadiens wears red jerseys and have blue helmets. In default NHL94 all helmets and jersey colors are shared. Leagues outside NHL usually have more different colors for jerseys and helmets.

In my jersey edit I took the blade color off. that's one extra color to use and if you paint sticks black/skin color or change the other skin color to stick color that's another color to use.

Also you can use 4 sets of different 16 color palettes for each 8x8 tile (but you can only use ONE at a time). The default team banner colors. the rink colors, hometeam colors and awaysteam colors.

I hope you will have time and dedication to make it happen.

Funny you mention that - I was just talking with mack about this earlier. If you would have used Tile Molester when you did your hack, you would have been done in about half the time. I found a method that works pretty good following wboys instructions on rearranging the block size columns and rows.

I opened the working bin, set the codec, set the block size to 1 column and 4 rows, then applied my palette from a 3 color team (Calgary is good due to the contrast). When you scroll down to the players you can see that a majority of them already have their tiles in order. The others are there but they're in sequence and not easy to edit - so you create a new file in TM (about 2000 in size), create a custom palette and then cut and paste from your working file onto the new file you created to assemble the pieces to your players. It acts just like the Tile Assembler in TLP. After the edits, cut and paste them back into the master working file and there you go.

Right now I'm just working in a test mode to make sure the animations don't look all wonky with the sprite edits. But its going pretty good so far.

Ok - then off to work I go.

So I've been thinking about this since like.... 1994. This thing sorta sat on the backburner, and after realizing ROM hacks are possible I decided to try it out. Being creative by nature, I always wanted to maximize the "real" factor by adding details. Its tough when you've only got a small block to work with though.

We all know you've got a limited number of pixels per sprite and a palette of 16 colors.

If you follow the guide set up in NOSE, here's what each color in the palette does: (humor me - there is a point to this...)

Starting from the top left:

1 - Ice Color

2 - Skate Blade

3 - Eyes, Gloves and Skates

4 - Pants Shadow

5 - Pants Base Color

6 - Pants Highlight Color

7 - Skin Highlight

8 - Skin Color

9 - Strip Shadow

10 - Strip 1 Color

11 - Shoulder/Strip 2 Color

12 - Jersey/Helmet/Sock Color Shadow

13 - Jersey/Helmet/Sock Color

14 - Jersey/Helmet/Sock Color Shadow 2

15 - Stick

16 - Player Shadow on Ice

Now you guys have worked with this for years and altered the colors and tweaked it and for the most part, its worked fine. Next year, with the introduction of these new-fangled jerseys, a lot of these designs are going to go to the pooper. So I'm trying a little experiment to see if I can separate more of the items on the list and combine a few of the common colors more efficiently, so you don't have to have a stripe around the shoulder just to get a stripe on the pants, etc. It sounds like a bit of a waste, but its something I've been tinkering with and I think I have a formula that works.

The drawback is it won't be easy to switch colors in NOSE until I can firm something up with wboy to display the changes properly (similar to the SWOS hack).

Getting back to my overall idea, what I need your input on is this. I was thinking of adding numbers, logos and shoulder patches to the jersey. They wont be anything detailed like in NHL95 for the PC, but a couple of off color pixels as a representation just to add to the realism. Thing is, the players all share textures so the number may just end up being a blob or two (like an 11 or a 22) that acts as a representation - and the same with the logo.

Before I go and modify all those sprites, would anyone think thats a cool idea? Just throwing it out there.

And for the color changes, here's what I'm proposing. I will make the edits to the sprites by hand myself and show you the sheet once I get enough of them done.

1 - Ice Color

2 - Skate Blade

3 - Eyes, Glove Outline, Skates, Dark Shadows

4 - Pants Shadow

5 - Pants Base Color

6 - Pants Strip

7 - Skin Highlight

8 - Skin Color

9 - Strip 1 Color

10 - Strip 2 Color

11 - Shoulder Color

12 - Jersey/Helmet/Sock/Glove Color Shadow

13 - Jersey/Helmet/Sock/Glove Color

14 - Logo/Number/Shoulder Logo Color

15 - Stick

16 - Player Shadow on Ice

You'll see the changes aren't too extensive. They're just slight alterations, but you'll be able to have separate entries for stripe colors and shoulders.

Now the OTHER thing I was going to do was the sprite edits themselves. I tried pasting some of the sprites from 98 into 94, but the main problem is the sprites in 98 are 3 columns wide and the ones in 94 are 2 columns wide. There are some sprites that are 2 wide in 98, but they're transition sprites in the animation so there aren't enough of them to place into 94 to make skating look natural. So I think I'm going to try something different. The sprites in 94 as cute as they may be, bug me. Our boys are too fat. So instead of having 10 Keith Tkachubs rolin around on the ice, I'm going to slim down some of the player sprites so they're not all a bunch of tubs on the rink. I figure, since I'm doing the color swaps I may as well edit the bodies slightly. I did a few frames and it looked pretty decent. I'll let you be the judge when I get further.

So there's my windbag post. Any comments? Questions?