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This is a doable hack, I think.

You could do it using the knowledge in the "ROM hacking school" thread: http://forum.nhl94.c...__30#entry94927

I can try to guide you through it over a few days.

First, download the utilities needed from the other thread

The goal is to find where it stores the "4" value that tells the game a team won the series, and change it to a 2. To do that, you first need to figure out where it stores the current number of wins.

Using gens rerecording...

1.

Play a playoff game up until a minute or so before the game ends. Make sure one of the teams is winning

2.

Make a savestate by pressing the F5 key, so you can come back to this point easily/quickly if you need to.

3.

Hit the ESC key to pause the game

4.

Go to Tools->RAM Search, which brings up the RAM Search window

5.

There are currently zero wins, so set the options to "Equal To", "Specific Value" (set the value to 0), "1 byte", "Signed"

6.

Click the "Search" button to eliminate all non-zero values

7.

Play out the clock so a team wins, hit ESC to pause

Change to the next save slot and make a new save state

Change the Specific value to 1.

Search again. There will probably still be lots of values in the list. So you need to play the next game and search for 2, then 3, then 4.. hopefully by that point it's down to just a handful of RAM addresses!

Let me know how it goes

Next step will be to do a trace to figure out what ROM instructions access the RAM address, then we can try to see where the key "4" value is.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 years later...

This is a pretty simple hack so I encourage anyone to try the hacking tools and guide I posted above and ask any questions here.

Hey Smoz,

Do you think it's possible to fix the playoffs mode for 94 in online too ?

Apparently it works with the 92 rom...

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I would try to find this on my own, I am not afraid of playing with hex editors and values and offsets and such but the rerecording tool is extremely slow on my computers with Linux distributions. I will try that with Windows installed in the future.

Was hoping if someone else already had figured this out.

Anyway, thanks for your answer smozoma and especially for your weight bug fix, it makes the Genesis version much much better than the original one! :-)

@Pearate,

can you give us more info about your findings in 92 rom? I guess it's very similar or exactly the same in 94 rom!

Edited by DominikJagr
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When you play the first game of the series, and then you want to continue to the second game, there is a bug,

don"t remember exactly, but you can't continue the series.

We tried this a couple of time.

It's seem that the game load a local save stat or something, and do the fact that the 2 players don't have the same save state, it result whit a bug,

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The emulator you all use doesnt have something like "do not make a save state" or "disable sram" options? Or put the emulator and the rom to a read only folder to disable the emul to make any save states.

It's Gens, and I don't think it's possible to disable the auto SRAM save.

I don't tried with Keka Fusion or Gens + maybe it works

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Yes, but why does it works with the 92 rom ?

I think 92 and 94 behave differently. 92 uses password system and does not store any information in the memory or as a savestate. In 94 the game stores the information in memory/save state. When you beat Dallas with Buffalo in 94, your game stores the information Buffalo-1:0-BuffaloPlayersStats-etc but your opponent has Dallas-0:1-DallasPlayersStats-etc info stored. That leads to desynch as the roms are different at that point.

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Not gonna be much help here but I do notice when I play 93 or 94 it always puts an srm file in gens.

92 does not.

By the way we did not change anything to get a best of 5.

we just used best of 7 and quit after game 3, 4, or 5.

It works great and has no bugs associated with it.

I wish I could figure a way to play the later rounds so we could like have the cup awarded when Raph and Labs play, but all I can figure is how to do it with the 1st round each time. Hence why I made a new rom for each round.

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In this way I figure that the best option with the 94 rom is to play in playoffs mode and start a new game in each round.

Sad that we don't have an auto launcher for the game like SWOS (sensible wolrd of soccer)

http://www.sensiblesoccer.de/community/downloads

I contacted the guy 2 years ago to see if he can build a similar auto launcher for NHL94. He's response was positive.

Maybe someone with a better English than me can ask him again.

If we can have a similar auto launcher, we can have some good perspective for the community.

For example the tool can launch automatically the result of a game on a server. And you can select some different hack you want to use from the pack.

Take a look here

http://www.sensiblesoccer.de/forum/index.php?topic=21669.0

Edited by Pearate
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The problem is the SWOS autolauncher does not change anything in the game code, its only an emulator with preconfigured setup (that tells the emulator to run the game from hdf=hard drive file) with some cool features added but the game itself is not changed in any way (only the save disk is, but the save disk is not part of the game).

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Maybe the simple launcher telling the emulator not to store any srm files would be the solution but that's not possible without understanding the code of the emulator :-) It's mabye easier to find what happens in the rom when storing data to memory and tell the rom don't do anything by erasing or rewriting certain values in hex editor like people do with checksums.

I would try making folder with the emulator read only on both sides (you-opponent) first, that seems to me like the best solution that costs nothing :-)

Edited by DominikJagr
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Maybe the simple launcher telling the emulator not to store any srm files would be the solution but that's not possible without understanding the code of the emulator :-) It's mabye easier to find what happens in the rom when storing data to memory and tell the rom don't do anything by erasing or rewriting certain values in hex editor like people do with checksums.

Yes, but I imagined that the 2 players can use the same folder for the SRAM save state :)

Maybe it can fix the problem.

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Not sure if its possible to allow another person accessing to your hard drive just via emulator :-)

About that read-only folder. You as a community can use the same srm file created just for the purpose of online gaming and this srm file make read-only, that should prevent the game make any changes.

Run the emulator, opent the original NHL 94 rom, close the emulator, make created srm file read only, add it into the package with the bin and then make it downloadable for other people playing in the online leagues.

Edited by DominikJagr
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Not sure if its possible to allow another person accessing to your hard drive just via emulator :-)

About that read-only folder. You as a community can use the same srm file created just for the purpose of online gaming and this srm file make read-only, that should prevent the game make any changes.

Run the emulator, opent the original NHL 94 rom, close the emulator, make created srm file read only, add it into the package with the bin and then make it downloadable for other people playing in the online leagues.

Good Idea

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