kingraph

kingraph (Me) newjerseykiller ( @newjerseykiller ) niuhuskie224 ( @niuhuskie224 ) kingofnhl94 ( @smozoma & @halifax ) 94_chaos ( @chaos) newwhaleorder ( @BigValboski ) 94dangler ( @dangler ) dantml ( @danTML7 ) 1976dolfoliver ( @Adolf Oliver Nipples) Some of these haven't posted in a while, but if you give the folks a follow you'll be notified when they do stream!

@clockwise, try this, works for me when swapping between Gens and SNES controllers.

I have been pretty inactive in terms of ROM hacking for quite a while now, so I haven't tested or tried it out. I've been keeping tabs and the explosion of information that came out this last year as a result of the 92 source code find has been absolutely incredible. @chaos and @McMarkis in particular have gone above and beyond with their time to studying, dissecting and ultimately showering us with these amazing hacks.

For a while there were a few leagues that used the dedicated goalie button hack. From what I remember, at the time there were some additional configurations needed to be made in GENS, otherwise there was an instant desync. This may not be the case with RetroArch (current main emulator for leagues for many years now), so might be worth revisiting. Second, despite the intuitive advantage of having a dedicated button for goalie control, the benefits didn't seem to translate as much in league play. And if they did, there weren't as impactful as you'd imagine. Might be the years of playing with "holding B", but I think that combination of tech issues and minimal gain in gameplay, is why the use of the hack eventually faded. I still place the hack as one of the all-time greatest ever.

Gents, maybe I can help point in the right direction. A while back @clockwise worked with Kaneda to make a hack to have the "Y" button be a dedicated goalie change button for Sega. While I haven't gotten into it myself, I imagine you could find/use the information to enable the extra button. I would guess there is a command to jump to a routine when the button is pressed, in this case switch to goalie, or more accurately the goalie control button with zero delay. Could this then be switched to "initiate line changes", assuming you can locate that function? I think that'd be a good start. Simultaneously disable holding A. It's probably more difficult than I am making it out to be, but I am hoping it helps. Ideally you could improve and make the X or Z button be dedicated for the line change.

Adding notes from Kaneda here: https://gendev.spritesmind.net/page-nhl94.html

Hi there, on the 30 Team ROM, the banners in the scoreboard menu are a picture that you have to adjust in TM. The location is 1D16CC. If it's the original ROM, it's a bit trickier as there are shared tiles, but the location is ABA1E. The original also has an identical, but separate picture for the main menu at AFE1C. The 30 Team ROM just has "Home" and "Away" on the main menu.

From my memory, I believe there was a decent amount of free space in the base '95 ROM. While I shuffled things around, I didn't have to expand it from 2MB so creating space should not be an issue, especially if you're keeping to 28 teams. If you have some experience here, you will have to find the locations and pointers of the original banners - there may be two sets, I forget -- and in '95 there is the team names on the scoreboard banner, as well as the calendar/season mode initials. You then have to find new space to create the new image with no shared tiles and change the pointers to the new location. I explain how to remove shared tiles here: https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/19978-how-to-decompress-graphics-in-sega-genesis/ So this really depends on how much experience you have here. If you've done some graphic editing and moving, are familiar with hex editing and Tile Molestor, I think this is manageable. Having no experience, this will take quite a bit of time to understand.

If you're using the 34 team ROM, here are the references on how to change the team banners: If you're using the base ROM, that's quite a bit more involved because as you mention, the banners share tiles.

The net is a bit of a different animal as it part of the entire rink background. I think this reference from @AdamCatalyst will be useful for anything regarding rink alterations: https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/26232-how-to-edit-the-rink-sideboards-more-nhl-94/ Having said that I don't have much experience editing the rink background myself, and I have not been doing much with '94 graphic editing in years, so I can only point you to a (hopefully) helpful direction.

When you mean "game day", are you saying when you go attend a live NHL game? I wear a jersey just about every time I go to a NYR game.

The overall team rating is a "hardcoded" number in the game, not a calculation that the game does. There's a number for each team, more information can be found here: https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/1332-how-can-you-edit-the-overall-team-rating/#findComment-85846

It's been a while since I've really delved into hacking, but from what I remember I liked the r57shell for the VRAM and trace/hook options. Something was missing from Kmod, I just forgot what. I never really had feedback on emulation accuracy or reasons to look elsewhere, so I just stuck with what I knew. I believe with all the work that @chaos and @McMarkis (SNES, but he snoops around Genesis too) have been doing recently they are using IDA Pro, which can set breakpoints (a area of code that when triggered, pauses the game), that are extremely useful. I'll let those guys comment as I don't have the experience of how that works or interfaces with some other emulator.

Correct -- link to the reference for this interested: https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/33959-how-to-fix-hotcold-bonus-bug-snes/

The only way I've found headers is looking for a group of tiles in TM, and finding the first tile as best I can. Note the hex location. If it's a straightforward graphic, the header should be 10 bytes before that first tile, so I'll look in a hex editor around that first tile location. It's not foolproof, some graphics in games are not as straightforward. I think some graphics are created during the game via some decompression routine or something I don't fully understand. Said another way, I think there are graphics in Sega games that can't be found by tile searching in TM.

SNES Balanced League (SBL) ROM: NHL '94 (USA)_Hot_Cold_Patched.sfc Season 01 will use an SNES ROM with the following hack applied: Fix hot/cold bonus bug Reference: https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/33959-how-to-fix-hotcold-bonus-bug-snes/ League Format Classic Style League (Pick one team for season) 40 Game Regular Season 16 Team cap 4 Divisions, 2 Conferences (assumed 16 teams) Single League (no A/B) Waitlist possible after 16 Team Draft will be weighted based on coaches Elo (lowest Elo draft first) Season duration: 4 weeks (~10 games a week) Playoff Format 12 Teams Conference winners are top 2 seeds Regular season points to make playoffs, seeding based on win % Will be same if all games played. No reseeding Duration: To be played promptly. Streamed live or recorded/streamed if possible. 1st Round Top 4 seeds get first round bye 5 vs 12 6 vs 11 7 vs 10 8 vs 9 2nd Round 1 vs (winner of 8 vs 9) 2 vs (winner of 7 vs 10) 3 vs (winner of 6 vs 11) 4 vs (winner of 5 vs 12)

I agree! But in that regard it does appear some folks are also making updates to '98 as well.

Are you saying convert NHL'98 player stats and teams to a '94 ROM? Here are some examples that I found: @CoachMac did one here: https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/19792-1951-1970-and-1971-1999-roms/#findComment-180098 @naples39 did deadline ROMs: https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/15608-my-deadline-roms/ @slapshot67: https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/4327-70s80s90s00s-roms/page/4/#findComment-180065 To be honest, I haven't played/tried them so can't speak to any specifics.

The code 6700 is the instruction in the game to "Branch on Equal" and the code 6000 is "Branch Always". I haven't delved into the code, but I assume the game was doing a test to see if the player was supposed to have the QB functions or if it was a player after a catch/run. Again, this is just a guess but the code you changed was probably something like: * Check if the active player is QB or runner. If it's a runner (branch on equal), go to (branch) to the function to make the player a runner. Changed to * Always goto runner (branch always). So from it sounds like, when you press the pass button, that routine now just says "this is a runner". Which yes, bypasses the passing window, but is not the desired outcome. I agree, the leading assumption would be that there is a function that calls up thet passing window routine and you can just bypass that. I'll try to help.

Can you post the ROMs here, or update your original message for reference?

TBD. It's tough to figure out since we don't have a large sample to begin with and even smaller with geographic location. Agree that a regional distribution makes sense, but it could also be printing machine, factory, random, etc. A little while back @McMikey asked Sean Ramjagsingh (current NHL EA Sports) if he or anyone at EA knew what the letters represented, but no dice. FYI, we have only captured afraction of the estimated first round numbers out there. As of today, 460 copies, which is 0.13% of an estimated 350,000. And even fewer where we captured the current location of the box. And even then we can't determine if that was the original sale location.

Absolutely LOVE the sales receipt!

LEAGUES AND LEAGUES AND LEAGUES: https://nhl94online.com/, and there is a '95 Discord with their own leagues: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GBDlaeQQriDsBREbpbdMsb61Ccgq9YkqcnsrW722MTA/edit Classic league, draft leagues, different roster leagues, different rules leagues, etc. The hardcore folks on the forums barely play any games vs the CPU. Ironically a season mode would ultimately not be exciting for us, outside of the accomplisment of hacking it into the game. Nothing wrong with it, and I agree a 32 team season mode in '95 would be tons of fun for the majority of people.

You've also just made me realize that the faceoff window is not in the same location each time. So I agree with your conjecture that the overlay is relatvive to some point rather than a fixed x/y (credit to @swos for this graphic below)

Thanks for this above - I've started to poke around and not as straighforward as some of the other x/y graphics I've seen in the past. Will continue to work on this, seems like a fun project.