Tickenest

Check the May 20th, 2006 entry on the front page of nhl94.com. I just checked the link to the mp3 and the file's still there.

Evan's being a little modest. I mean, no, he didn't make the emulators or dump the ROMs, but he made this site and definitely facilitated the growth of NHL '94 online. It's even more of an accomplishment in light of the fact that most people who play emulators online do it to play arcade fighting games (King of Fighters, Street Fighter, others I know nothing about). So take a bow, Evan.

Yeah, I was disappointed by his "lowball" offer, but I just wanted to close the deal.

It's ok, Evan. I just talked to Ed Belfour and he said he would give you one million dollars to run the league this season.

Most people on Kaillera servers are playing fighting games, like Super Street Fighter Alpha EX Gold Volume III Hyper: Third Awesome Strike. You're better off prearranging things until you get to know who plays NHL '94. At that point you might be able to find games just by going onto Kaillera servers and asking them if you see them, but keep in mind that a lot of the time they'll have already arranged to play an opponent.

Evanrulz

Hmm...someone doesn't seem to grasp the difference between two consecutive trades and a three-way trade.

I don't know who you are or why you matter but all I have to say is that there will not be a trade that's noteworthy in any online league of this nature until someone manages to pull off a three-way trade. The person who wades through *that* quagmire and makes it happen will truly be a giant among men.

I don't think they're right, honestly. I've played many, many games on a Finland server with ping at about 140 ms, and that was definitely what I was getting, but they never said that they were slowed down. I've also played them occasionally on a US server, and I've definitely had much better response time. I think the anti3d.com guys actually have it wrong, which is possible because they didn't make Kaillera. So I don't think that a player with a slow connection messes up the player with the fast connection, but I think that the player with the choppy connection messes everyone up. In other words, a smooth but slow connection makes the slow player lag but doesn't mess anyone else up. A choppy connection, regardless of lag, messes everyone up. It's just that typically, the slow connection *is* the choppy connection, so I don't think people distinguish the two as much as they should.

Are you sure that's how it works, Scribe? Has anyone here actually figured out 100% how it works? Here's how I always thought it worked (and why it could handle two players of disparate pings): When you're running Gens with Kaillera going, your inputs get intercepted by Kaillera before they ever get to the emulation. Instead, your inputs go to the Kaillera server, which keeps track of all the inputs it's been getting from you and your opponent. It synchronizes those inputs and sends them back to both players simultaneously, and once each player receives the inputs the player's emulator processes them. That way the two players don't have to have the same exact ping. The player with the faster connection gets better response time because the round-trip time between when he pushes a button and when the Kaillera server sends that button push back to him is faster. The slower player can still play but is farther behind. In other words, your "ping" is a measure of how far in time behind the stream of synchronized inputs your perception of the game is. I think that if you had two computers side-by-side, one with 20ms ping and one with 200ms ping, and had them play each other, you'd see the same action on both screens, just with the second computer being about 180ms behind. The most important thing about a connection for good Kaillera play, therefore, isn't so much low ping as much as it is low packet loss (i.e. lack of dropped packets between player and Kaillera server.) A desync occurs when one or both clients time out to the server and one or both players have a gap in the stream of inputs and therefore are no longer playing the same game. But yeah, maybe it's Kega ftw from now on.

Really? I get trash talked about always? Wow, I'm flattered.

Well, it's all true, everything you've read about me. What can I say? I like my peaches.

A couple of the Fins have suggested trying Kega, another Genesis emulator, because it has better netplay. You guys should try it sometime. I would but I'm busy these days.

Perhaps you're the Peyton Manning of NHL '94 online. Or maybe you're the Spalding Gray. One or the other.

This message is a test. Evan asked me to test because he just thinks I'm that cool. blahbittyblahblah

Roar roar, good to see you here, Toro.

Um, are you suggesting that the average visitor hits 100 pages?

Hey, Evan, any unusual surge in traffic on Friday afternoon? Deadspin had a post about NHL '94 and I'm just wondering if maybe some people found their way here, even though the post was actually about a blog entry examining the 88-page (!) manual.

The Flyers wrapped up their regular season with a 2-1 home loss to Montreal last night. It has been a trying season for the Flyers as the level of competition has risen considerably from last season, and an early-season slump did the club no favors. The squad did turn things around to post a healthy 25-15-0 record and secure a playoff spot, but will last season's losing Stanley Cup finalists manage anything more than perhaps an early-round series win?

Don't have a cow, man.

WTF FTW

smozoma? More like slo-zzzzz-oh my god i gave up another goal-ma i'm getting pounded come take me home. At first, we all thought he just desyncked a lot, but eventually, we realized that he was actually skating into empty corners and pressing random buttons. It just looked as though he'd desyncked. Sorry, man, I wouldn't have done this but after your Vanbiesbrouk effort I felt compelled to try one of my own.

addison and smozoma hit upon the key issue here, which is that having larger playoffs reduces the number of players who will end up having games to play after they've been eliminated from playoff contention, and it lessens the number of those meaningless games they'll have on their schedule. Since there aren't tens of thousands of fans buying tickets to watch these games, there's no way to fine a player millions of dollars for forfeiting games, and we can't *shoot* people for not playing, the next best thing is to keep as many people vested in the outcome of their games as long as possible. The most extreme solution is to have everyone in the playoffs, but I think most people would agree that that format is best for rec leagues where the level of competitiveness and play is lower than it is in this league (i.e. we play for fun but this is the best concentration of NHL '94 talent in North America (largely because we're just about the only concentration of NHL '94 talent in North America), as opposed to your plain old Sunday beer league which is played for fun and participation more than anything else.) So having 16 out of 20 teams make the playoffs is the best solution in a setting where we can't force people to play all of their games and care all the way to the end, even when they're out of playoff contention. Or we could just declare kgman the champ and be done with it.

I've actually surged since coming back from my self-imposed hiatus. SO THERE

It certainly helped that the keeper got obstructed by one of his own men.