NHLPA Hockey '93 - 64-team ROM (SNES)

[smozoma]

64-Team NHLPA'93 ROM v0.96

Here is an NHLPA '93 ROM hacked to have up to 64 teams.

An editor is included (it's an Excel spreadsheet that you can edit player names etc in and it'll generate hex code you can paste into the ROM).

NHLPA Hockey 93 (64 teams) v096.zip

If you made a custom ROM with the previous version, please send me your old editor file, and I'll port the information over into the new editor. (PM me and I'll give you my email address)

Features:

• 64 teams.
  • 30 NHL teams (rosters up until July 9th 2010, might be a few mistakes and wrong numbers)
    
  • 24 KHL (plus 2 All Star teams) from the 2009-10 season
    
  • 8 Olympics teams from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics
    

  [*]Banners for all teams.

  [*]Updated Ron Barr text.

  [*]Menu defaults changed to 5 minute periods, PHI vs CHI, Penalties On with No Offsides.

  [*]Playoff trees for the NHL and KHL, including last year's NHL 1st-round matchups.

Unfeatures (things I didn't feel like doing, but that you can do):

• I did not do any player or team attribute editing, so good players/teams might have bad ratings, and vice versa.
  
• Since there are so many teams/players, but limited space for team/player info in the ROM, I had to keep player names short. Most players only have first initials. If you want full names, then see the FAQ (next post) for how to remove teams to free up space.
  
• Uniform colours were just copied from the uniform palettes from the original ROM, so for the new teams, they are close, but not totally accurate.
  

A quick-and-dirty editor is included (Excel required. 2007 recommended, but older versions of excel or OpenOffice.org Calc should work; however, I haven't tried them). The 'editor' (if it can really be called that...) also tells you the several bytes to change to hide teams you don't want to see, if you don't want to use them all.

Maybe some day I'll return to '93 and make the intro graphics and Ron Barr image editable, but for now I'm done with '93. If you make your own version now, and I update this later with editable intro graphics, it will be trivial to port your work to the updated ROM, so don't hesitate to go ahead and make something cool now.

v0.96 - Fixed penalty crash. Fixed a bug in the editor with the lines.

v0.95 - Increased to 64 teams. Added editable banners, current NHL rosters, last season's KHL and Olympics rosters. Improved editor.

v0.91-v0.92 - Bug fixes.

v0.90 - First release. 52 teams. Excel-based Editor.

Current version:

14 July 2010 - v0.96 - NHLPA Hockey 93 (64 teams) v096.zip

Old versions:

12 July 2010 - v0.95 - NHLPA Hockey 93 (64 teams) v095.zip

16 April 2010 - v0.92 - NHLPA_Hockey___93__52_teams__v092.zip

[smozoma]

Editing FAQ:

THINGS NOT TO DO:

In the excel spreadsheet 'editor':

• Do not change or delete anything in a grey square, even if the square appears empty (there might be a formula in it that displays nothing in some cases)
  
• Do not cut and insert teams from one place to another in the "1. Teams" page of the editor. This will screw things up. If you want to reorder the teams, you need to do it by editing the yellow squares on the "2. Team Pointers" page of the editor, or by manually editing the text for the team on the "1. Teams" page.
  

What Do I Need?:

You need 2 programs:

1. Excel from MS Office, or Calc from Open Office
   
2. a hex editor
   

And you need the 64-team ROM and the Excel file that comes with it (this excel file is the 'editor', but really it just creates hex data you can paste into the ROM with a hex editor)

How Do I Edit Player names and attributes?:

Here are a few pictures showing how. (I had to split it up into multiple pictures because the forum wouldn't accept one huge one)

I added players, and now the game crashes. Why?

There is limited space for players, so you need to remove some players from other teams (or shorten their names) to add more players. Space for team/player info is limited to bytes 803c0-87fff in the ROM, by a technical limitation of the SNES. If you have too much team/player data in the editor, an error will display in orange at the top of the table.

If you delete a player, make sure you also delete his attributes, not just his name. And then make sure the lines don't reference the deleted player.

Also, make sure your player names are not too long. An error message will be displayed in orange below the player's name if it's too long.

See http://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?s=&sh...ost&p=91230

How Do I Remove a Team?:

Say you want to create a KHL ROM. Youyou don't want the NHL or Olympics teams showing up, and you want to free up space for more player names.

1. On the "1. Teams" page of the editor, go to the teams you don't want to display. Delete the player names and attributes. Copy the Team data to the ROM (@803c0), as shown in the images in the "How Do I Edit Player names and attributes?" question/answer.
   
2. On the "2. Team Pointers" page, change the numbers in the yellow cells so the first team you want in the ROM is 0, and the next ones are 1,2,etc.
   


1. Make the teams you don't want in the ROM have higher numbers than the teams you do want.
   

[*]Sort the table on the yellow column.

1. (Excel 2003: Select cell B6, then click the A->Z icon shown here.)
   
2. (Excel 2007: select cell B6, press the same icon as for Excel 2003, or press Alt,A,A on your keyboard)
   

[*]Copy the team pointer data to the ROM (@80040)

[*]On the "4. Num of Teams" page, set the number of home teams and away teams allowed in the ROM to the number of teams you want, then copy the values to the ROM. Do the same for the number of playoff teams. In total, you should be pasting 5 times for this step (home teams, away teams, 3x playoff teams).

[*]Update the playoff matchups on the "5. Playoffs" page and paste to the appropriate location.

If you run the ROM now, only the teams you want to see should be visible. However, when you re-order teams, you break the banners. See the appropriate FAQ question for how to fix that...

How Do I Edit the Banners?

(Slowly working on updating this... ask any specific questions and I'll fill in the info)

Banners are made of 18 tiles, arranged in 2 rows of 9. Each tile is 8x8 pixels.

The banner tiles are pulled from one big graphic in the ROM, but the graphic's size is limited to 585 tiles -- only enough for 32.5 banners. In order to get more than 32 banners, tiles are repeated/shared between banners.

The tiles I included in this ROM generally fit one letter upper-half or lower-half per tile (so each letter is 2 tiles), which is great for cities with 9, 7, 5, or 3 letters (DETROIT, CHICAGO, MINNESOTA, etc), since you can assigned letters or blank tiles to each of the 2x9 tiles and you get a nice centred name (such as the CHICAGO banner below).

Figure 1:

Even though the CHICAGO banner is 18 tiles, it only requires 14 actual tiles in the ROM, because the C appears twice, as well as the blank space.

The PHILADELPHIA banner is a bit tougher. The city name has 12 letters in it, so you need to make some custom tiles with more than one letter per tile. I made 4 tiles with "PHI", and 4 more tile with "ADE". Then I make the banner using the PHI tiles, then an L, ADE, L, PHI, A.

Also note that the PHI and CHI banners share the same upper-A black tile.

Here is the banner graphic I included in the ROM:

Figure 2:

It includes all letters for upper black and lower yellow. Most upper and lower letters in red, dark blue, and bright blue. About half the letters in bright green. About half in upper dark green, lower orange, and lower gold.

After that, you can see an upper-black and lower-yellow "TON", which is from BOSTON. BOSTON has 6 letters, so I shrank the TON part to make it look a bit more centred. After that is TON from EDMONTON (8 letters). TFO from HARTFORD (8 letters), and so on.

at the very bottom is the KHL custom tiles. I needed a bunch of them because so many of their city/team names are so long.

So how do you tell the ROM which tile to load as part of a banner?

Open up the editor and go to page "3. Banners". There is a big table with numbers with varying shades of yellow/orange backgrounds. This is where you enter tile numbers.

Figure 3:

The graphic in Figure 2, with the banner tiles is 15x39 tiles. So the top row of tiles (the black upper parts of _ABCDEFGHIJKLMN) is tile IDs 0-14. Below that, the lower half yellow tiles of _ABCDEFGHIJKLMN, are tiles 15-29.

Next to where it says BOS Upper, you can see 0 0 2. This corresponds to showing the blank upper black tile (0) twice, and then the upper black B tile (2) once.

To make figuring out which tile ID goes with which letter easier, there is also a table of which tile ID is which coloured tile, to the right of the place where you edit the tiles. (There are 3 different helper tables.. this image below is the middle one)

Figure 4:

So, edit the yellow/orange area, then copy/paste the blue cells into your ROM at @88040

If you want to customize the graphic, then open up the ROM in Tile Molester and go to 88040. Then set the width of the area to 15 tiles and the height to 39. Your graphic should be 120x312 pixels.

If you want to just put 32 or fewer straight banners in the ROM, then you can use a width/height in Tile Molester of 9x65. Your graphics should be 72*520 pixels.

If you need more help, ask.

How Do I Edit the Ron Barr text?:

The Ron Barr text is found at offset @90000 in the ROM. Each blurb MUST end with the '0D' hex character, as the game counts these to know which blurb to display. You can change the size of the blurbs if you want.

There needs to always be 64 team blurbs, even if there are not 64 teams in the ROM. The game searches for the "Hi Welcome to [Cityname]. I'm Ron Barr for EASN." text in location 65, so all other 64 need to be there, even if they aren't used.

[halifax]

52 teams....thats sick bud..nice work...thanks.

[beavers33]

holy crap smoz, that's amazing. if only it could be done for gens...it can't, can it?

[smozoma]

holy crap smoz, that's amazing. if only it could be done for gens...it can't, can it?

i'm not sure how much work for me it would be, but it would be way less for wboy who already knows how it all works... i wonder why he didn't make a monster ROM, maybe there was some kind of technical limitation (but I'm not sure what it would be)

[beavers33]

yeah, i just remembered hearing that 32 would be the max, but i don't think i ever found out exactly why. i guess if i did some searching, i could find something about why...i'm just not interested in that right now, haha.

way to go on the snes MONSTER, though!

[jenzie]

i'm not sure how much work for me it would be, but it would be way less for wboy who already knows how it all works... i wonder why he didn't make a monster ROM, maybe there was some kind of technical limitation (but I'm not sure what it would be)

maybe it's down to the actual size of the rom? what size is the megadrive rom anyway?

and WOW at having a whopping 52 teams in one rom, that's amazing for ANY ROM!!!

pity it's not stable (it keeps crashing on my machine though, on both ZNES and SNES9X) and not as good as the megadrive version

but keep up the good work and maybe someone can usurp the snes one for a megadrive one (make it a 60 team rom and i'll kiss you!!! )

*kiss not applicable*

[smozoma]

pity it's not stable (it keeps crashing on my machine though, on both ZNES and SNES9X) and not as good as the megadrive version

where does it crash? if you give me info, i can try to fix it

yeah, this game actually really sucks.. i had already figured out a bunch of stuff before I actually needed to play it and discovered it was so bad, so I just finished it anyway... bad frame rate, jerky skating, your own goalie dives at every shot and gives up rebound goals, it can't play music and sounds at the same time... it's just a bad port of the sega version (unlike 94 which is actually it's own game, where they took it in their own direction apart from the sega version)

[top shelf]

where does it crash? if you give me info, i can try to fix it

yeah, this game actually really sucks.. i had already figured out a bunch of stuff before I actually needed to play it and discovered it was so bad, so I just finished it anyway... bad frame rate, jerky skating, your own goalie dives at every shot and gives up rebound goals, it can't play music and sounds at the same time... it's just a bad port of the sega version (unlike 94 which is actually it's own game, where they took it in their own direction apart from the sega version)

Disagree that this game really sucks. I know its a bit basic, as for frame rate I don't say anything but don't see the problem with goalies diving about as its more realistic than having them stood up all the time. Don't think the goalies give up that many rebounds no more than other games. I think in other areas it is better than other versions: harder slap shot, better player abilities than any other version, great PP if you are good enough to move it around, really good hits if you can line players up and good variation of scoring unlike other games where it is much easier to score in one part of the net than others. This is why I suddenly got interested in expanding the rom. Certainly it ain't perfect but neither is any other version.

Guess I won't change your mind but hey at least you're expanded rom won't go unused.

[Xstioph]

Haha, wow... 52 teams! Insane.. I have no idea how you've went about to do this so all I can say is: Impressive!

[shaftman]

52 teams!

[top shelf]

Smoz, had a quick go on the editor and looks like something is wrong.

What I have done - added new player names (left the rest of the data the same) copied in the team data and pointers and changed the no of teams. However, the game doesn't run. Looks like the pointers are not calculating correctly after the new data is put in.

[smozoma]

Smoz, had a quick go on the editor and looks like something is wrong.

What I have done - added new player names (left the rest of the data the same) copied in the team data and pointers and changed the no of teams. However, the game doesn't run. Looks like the pointers are not calculating correctly after the new data is put in.

EDIT: The cause of the crash was actually that some player names were too long.

Last names can be 11 letters long ("Niedermayer")

The length limit on first names is 9 if his sweater number is 0-9, or 8 if his sweater number is 10-99. So, for Alexander Ovechkin, since his number is 8 (between 0-9) and the length of "Alexander" is 9, you can fit his whole first name. For Alexander Semin, number 28 (between 10-99), you have to shorten his name to 8 or fewer letters ("Alexnder").

--

Whoops: There is limited space for names, and I filled it all up in my demo ROM. So, to add new players, you need to delete some of the existing ones.

There is a cell at the top of the spreadsheet that turns orange if you add too much data (see attachment).

If you change the number of teams accessed in the menu and make it fewer, then you can leave out the data for those teams. Just make sure when you paste that you don't go past @88000.

Edited July 13, 2010 by smozoma

[top shelf]

Whoops: There is limited space for names, and I filled it all up in my demo ROM. So, to add new players, you need to delete some of the existing ones.

There is a cell at the top of the spreadsheet that turns orange if you add too much data (see attachment).

If you change the number of teams accessed in the menu and make it fewer, then you can leave out the data for those teams. Just make sure when you paste that you don't go past @88000.

I had done this already (deleting info from the later teams) but it still doesn't work? Can send you what I've done if its easier.

[top shelf]

Whoops: There is limited space for names, and I filled it all up in my demo ROM. So, to add new players, you need to delete some of the existing ones.

There is a cell at the top of the spreadsheet that turns orange if you add too much data (see attachment).

If you change the number of teams accessed in the menu and make it fewer, then you can leave out the data for those teams. Just make sure when you paste that you don't go past @88000.

I had done this already (deleting info from the later teams) but it still doesn't work? Can send you what I've done if its easier.

[smozoma]

I had done this already (deleting info from the later teams) but it still doesn't work? Can send you what I've done if its easier.

sure, find me on AIM

[smozoma]

pity it's not stable (it keeps crashing on my machine though, on both ZNES and SNES9X) and not as good as the megadrive version

Has this crashed for anyone else? jenzie hasn't been on the boards or replied to my PM since he wrote that, so I don't know where the crash is.

[smozoma]

I was hoping to have the banners decompressed today, but I ran into a problem that I'll have to do some extra work to get around...

Since all the banners are stored together as one big graphic, then if I enlarge the graphic to have 52 banners, it overwrites other graphics in video memory, replacing them.. so other graphics in the game, like backgrounds and fonts, turn into fragments of banners. So... I'm not sure how to fix that yet.

[top shelf]

I was hoping to have the banners decompressed today, but I ran into a problem that I'll have to do some extra work to get around...

Since all the banners are stored together as one big graphic, then if I enlarge the graphic to have 52 banners, it overwrites other graphics in video memory, replacing them.. so other graphics in the game, like backgrounds and fonts, turn into fragments of banners. So... I'm not sure how to fix that yet.

This is great news that you are on the right track.

[smozoma]

I was making a bit more progress on the banners tonight and I finally stumbled upon what must be the crash jenzie reported: if you do a 7-game playoff series, the game will crash when loading the Ron Barr screen before the 2nd game. It forgets what teams it's trying to load. Weird.

Anyway, I'm looking into it.

Also, I think I figured out how to prevent the banners from overwriting other graphics in Video RAM, so 2 steps forward, 1 step back tonight.

[jenzie]

I was making a bit more progress on the banners tonight and I finally stumbled upon what must be the crash jenzie reported: if you do a 7-game playoff series, the game will crash when loading the Ron Barr screen before the 2nd game. It forgets what teams it's trying to load. Weird.

Anyway, I'm looking into it.

Also, I think I figured out how to prevent the banners from overwriting other graphics in Video RAM, so 2 steps forward, 1 step back tonight.

sorry for not replying, had some computer probs (had to install bloomin windows 98 again YES WIN98 don't start ) and i'm concentrating on my own roms so i haven't played it since then

hope you get the wee problems sorted

[smozoma]

Update!

1. You can now edit the banner graphics
   
2. The maximum number of teams the ROM can hold is now 64
   
3. The editor is slightly improved and also now tells you where you can change the main menu defaults.
   
4. Jenzie's playoff bug fixed. I had added more playoff matchups, but the game couldn't handle them, so I took them out.
   

Get it in the First Post!

If you made a ROM with the previous version, send me a PM and I'll update your editor to the new version, keeping your old data.

[Snyder]

Sorry If I sound like an idiot for posting this, but do you just need the editor that comes with the game file?

[smozoma]

Sorry If I sound like an idiot for posting this, but do you just need the editor that comes with the game file?

Good question. You need a hex editor, too. I recommend HxD.

You make modifications to the Excel 'editor' file, and then copy the hex code generated in the Excel file and paste it into the ROM at the locations specified in the excel file.

HxD tips:

Use Ctrl+B when pasting, instead of Ctrl+V. Ctrl+B pastes in overwrite mode.

Make sure you paste into the left side (hex side), not the right side (text side). The Ron Barr quotes are the only place you want to write in the text side, since the editor doesn't provide the hex code for ron barr quotes.

[SabreFan1]

This is awesome!

Sadly, it crashes whenever there's a penalty. Obviously, the easiest solution would just be turning penalties off, but still...

[smozoma]

This is awesome!

Sadly, it crashes whenever there's a penalty. Obviously, the easiest solution would just be turning penalties off, but still...

Thanks for the bug report! I missed this because it happens a little bit after the screen refreshes after a penalty. I figured it was fine when the screen loaded, so I reset the game before seeing the crash

Here is how to fix it:

Offset: @3A70
Old Value: $8300
New Value: $9000

Offset: @3D7E
Old Value: $8300
New Value: $9000

I'll also make a new version of the ROM for this topic (plus fixing a few player name/teams)

[smozoma]

New version released. Please upgrade.

Fixes:

ROM: There was a crash after a player got a penalty.

Editor: The cell formatting for the lines (scoring 1, etc) in the editor was not set correctly.

[top shelf]

Maybe some day I'll return to '93 and make the intro graphics and Ron Barr image editable, but for now I'm done with '93. If you make your own version now, and I update this later with editable intro graphics, it will be trivial to port your work to the updated ROM, so don't hesitate to go ahead and make something cool now.

Wow - this is amazing. To be able to edit the banners is really cool. Can't wait to have a proper look.

I know you said your finished for now but was just wondering how easy it would be to make the rink editable?

Also are the players on the bench editable??

[smozoma]

Wow - this is amazing. To be able to edit the banners is really cool. Can't wait to have a proper look.

I know you said your finished for now but was just wondering how easy it would be to make the rink editable?

Also are the players on the bench editable??

Haven't looked into it... probably a similar amount of work to making the banners or opening graphics editable.

[trudatman]

and puck and goal and siren and....