NHL 94 decomp and PC port possible?

[naples39]

Hey boys. I haven’t been around much recently, but I keep seeing all these decomp projects floating around (Mario 64, Zelda LttP, Super Metroid…etc), and was wondering if this was possible for NHL 94?

I am not a dev, and only have a general understanding of such a task. I presume it would take some knowledgeable people and quite a bit of time. The potential benefits could be enormous:

-More teams (hundreds of teams in a single ‘rom?’)
-easier/better graphics mods for logos, player photos, rinks, etc…
-widescreen image
-gameplay mods

I was just curious if anyone has ever considered this. Perhaps I am fundamentally wrong about some things. Perhaps it is theoretically possible, but the manpower isn’t there.

Either way, throwing it out there and was interested in the thoughts of others. 

 

[Drezz]

I'm assuming that the folks at Empty Clip have a basic decomp going. We could theoretically have one based on all the info we have scattered about here. Wboy's 30-team provides some interesting data points to look into and with a number of the things modders have figured out here, we should compile the info and start mapping out the structure. I know smoz had mentioned it a few times in the past, but it's a big-ass thankless job. LOL

I am interested though.

Didn't 77 have a basic decomp done by MarkyJester at one point?

[The Dopefish]

The only decompile projects I've seen are the ones you've mentioned, and none of them have been Sega games.  I would think that if anyone had seriously tried they would have done so first on Sonic 1, as a proof of concept principally but to spearhead the movement on Genesis games.

Coincidentally that doesn't mean it couldn't be tried on the SNES version, which seems to be where the majority of the effort is being placed.

[AdamCatalyst]

6 minutes ago, Drezz said:

I'm assuming that the folks at Empty Clip have a basic decomp going. 

Looking at the PS4 PKG, I couldn’t see any evidence to suggest they had a decomp going. I mean they may have, but the original ROM was “mostly untouched” in the PKG, and it appears the wrapper injects some new data, and makes some on the fly substitutions at the presentation level. So much more can be done when one doesn’t insist on making it run on original hardware!

The idea of a larger project that could benefit many appeals, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t have the expertise to contribute much.

Re: “Mostly untouched.” I need to make a note to try and figure out what was changed, in case it is of use to us.

 

[smozoma]

We have a couple decomps down to the assembly code somewhere on here (and another on the discord? I should copy that onto the forum if it's not here...). I opened up the ROM in IDA Pro (reverse engineering tool) many years ago, too.

It comes down to having people with the expertise and the time, but we don't really have that compared to those bigger and more traditional-gamer games. I don't think we have any games programmers here who know how to rewrite the graphics stuff, controller inputs, etc..so it'd be a lot of work for someone to learn.

[Drezz]

2 hours ago, The Dopefish said:

The only decompile projects I've seen are the ones you've mentioned, and none of them have been Sega games.  I would think that if anyone had seriously tried they would have done so first on Sonic 1, as a proof of concept principally but to spearhead the movement on Genesis games.

Coincidentally that doesn't mean it couldn't be tried on the SNES version, which seems to be where the majority of the effort is being placed.

I think there is a fair amount of decomp in Sonic games, but they choose to just keep it on emulators instead. There's a whole site that lists each hex command so you have an idea of what's happening. It's not a proper decomp but it's been broken down to understand things better.

Abdul @bcrt2000 has been working on a homebrew port of NHL95PC for modern systems, which is similar to NHL 94, just with a season mode and more bells and whistles.

 

 

[bcrt2000]

On 3/7/2023 at 9:21 AM, naples39 said:

Hey boys. I haven’t been around much recently, but I keep seeing all these decomp projects floating around (Mario 64, Zelda LttP, Super Metroid…etc), and was wondering if this was possible for NHL 94?

I am not a dev, and only have a general understanding of such a task. I presume it would take some knowledgeable people and quite a bit of time. The potential benefits could be enormous:

-More teams (hundreds of teams in a single ‘rom?’)
-easier/better graphics mods for logos, player photos, rinks, etc…
-widescreen image
-gameplay mods

I was just curious if anyone has ever considered this. Perhaps I am fundamentally wrong about some things. Perhaps it is theoretically possible, but the manpower isn’t there.

Either way, throwing it out there and was interested in the thoughts of others. 

 

I went down this same path a few months ago. Some folks on the discord pointed me to the partial dasm project by MarkyJester, which actually is able to compile a bit perfect version of NHL94. There still needs to be a lot done to separate the sound effects, music, tiles, player/teams db from game code, and then catalog the game code. Not to be discouraging, I felt like this effort would probably take me 5000-10000 hours to do, whereas doing a from scratch engine remake of the game in Unity would probably closer to 1000-2000 hours of effort for me.

That being said, I do think as a community it makes a lot of sense to do a dasm project of the original ROM, and if the community is successful, that could become the basis of any future rom edits, and add a lot more flexibility to what features could be added to the game (fighting, season mode)

Its available here: 

 

 

On 3/7/2023 at 1:26 PM, Drezz said:

I think there is a fair amount of decomp in Sonic games, but they choose to just keep it on emulators instead. There's a whole site that lists each hex command so you have an idea of what's happening. It's not a proper decomp but it's been broken down to understand things better.

Abdul @bcrt2000 has been working on a homebrew port of NHL95PC for modern systems, which is similar to NHL 94, just with a season mode and more bells and whistles.

 

 

I haven't fully settled on what it is yet-- at worst its going to be a best of both worlds hybrid of NHL 94 Genesis, and NHL 95 PC (+ fighting from 93). At best its going to be customizable and you can choose what you want from each version (and for the game to work in widescreen, I may need to do a new rink & a different rink-to-player ratio).

But I think the menus are just more intuitive from the console versions, so currently the working version's menu is based of NHL 94, and I think the Genesis version feels better to play, so while I do want the difficulty of scoring to be harder (maybe via a difficulty slider), I do want the game to play like the Genesis version. But I'm just settling on calling it an engine remake of NHL 94 to keep it simple for now

[naples39]

Thanks for sharing.  I figured people were out there doing cool things, but they certainly weren't going to be easy to pull off.