HOW TO: Enable Hidden "30 Second" Periods.

[McMarkis]

I'm aware this topic has come up before, but I've decided to document it here for easy reference in one place.

Guess what? Buried deep in the ROM, like a pirate's treasure, there's a sneaky '30 Second' period option playing hide-and-seek! If you're up for a bit of digital treasure hunting and want to unlock this secret in your ROM, just tweak these Hex values

ROM Offset: (hex)000F7927
Change: 03 to 04

 

Quote

To activate this feature on the original cartridge, just press and hold the A and C buttons on the player 1 controller until you reach the Start Game screen. Doing so will set the period time to a swift 00:30 seconds.

It's like whispering a secret code to open a hidden chamber! But beware, once you activate it, your game time could disappear faster than a fart in the wind – one minute you're playing, the next, poof! It's all over!

nhl94_30seconds.bin

[kidswasted]

This is awesome! Keep it coming!

[von Ozbourne]

This is great because it had a pattern that could be followed for the earlier games and it actually worked.

If anyone is interested,  the locations for adding the "Hidden fourth option" are:

NHL HOCKEY [92]
ROM Offset: (hex)0000E855
Change: 03 to 04

EA HOCKEY [92]
ROM Offset: (hex)0000E46F
Change: 03 to 04

NHLPA'93 [30 & 32 Team Versions]
ROM Offset: (hex)00013D33
Change: 03 to 04

NHLPA'93 [Original Version]
ROM Offset looks like it should be (hex)00013D1B
as this follows the same configuration as the other games, however changing 03 to 04 there just seems to freeze the game before the animated EASN logo screen loads.

Sadly, while it looked like the pattern held true into NHL'95 as far as finding a block of text that looked like the other games, changing this value did not appear to do anything, let alone activating the secret 30-second period option. NHL'96 - '98 did not however, keep the pattern intact, so there was not really anything to test yet.

 

Extra curricular reading:
Instead of changing the 03 to an 04, get crazy and try an 05!

This didn't crash the game, but led to some "interesting" consequences.

By my count "J" turned out to be the 27th number in the alphabet. So a period length set to an "Off, but fighting is okay" number of minutes ends up being 276:36 in length. Which may not be a threat to the 261 hours played in the world record hockey game, it's already almost 2.5 times the length of the longest NHL game. And you still have to multiply that by three. Just hope that after playing just shy of 830 minutes, you don't have a tie game.