Need your help with '94 [Moving Face-Offs, Refs, and more]

[AdamCatalyst]

Hi there,

I am *trying* to improve the wide mode patches by addressing all the leftover issues, and an ultimate goal of 32-team compliance. I've made good progress on this, but have a few things that I cannot figure out. Maybe you can help?

• How do I move the Face-off overlay window on the left & right side?
• How do I move the Ref overlay window?
• How do I move all the Bench & Crowd animation events that occur on face-offs, etc.?
• How to increase the viewport size of the size of the Crowd animation?
• How to switch the Sideboards view on Penalty calls to 256 pixel wide mode?

For that third item, I know that I can manually do this, but I was wondering if I could change their initial registration point, rather than every individual frame. 

For that last item, here is some background. When switching gameplay to 320 pixel mode, it also switches the pause screen (Sideboards view) to the same, which leads to video garbage, since the graphics are a fixed 256 pixels wide. There is already a hack to change the pause screen back to 256 pixel wide mode, but there isn't such a hack to do the same to the Sideboards view when a penalty is called. As of right now, I can't even find the code that writes out the Penalty call screen. 

Any help is appreciated.

p.s. Unrelated, but I also need help finding the code reference that tells the ROM to expect 3bpp headshot images. I can't figure out how to tell it to properly interpret new 4bpp images.

Edited Saturday at 06:01 PM by AdamCatalyst
updates

[AdamCatalyst]

Update: I figured out:

On 8/13/2024 at 9:08 AM, AdamCatalyst said:

• How do I move all the Bench & Crowd animation events that occur on face-offs, etc.?

Adjusting the value @ 0x0FD823 seems to do the trick.
 

Edited August 15 by AdamCatalyst

[von Ozbourne]

You seem to be knocking these out pretty well on your own.
In lieu of having time to actually help, I will offer up the much more valuable support of the moral variety.
You are ever the most welcome.

[AdamCatalyst]

Nah, I really am stuck on the rest. I had one last method to try and discern those two items, and it worked. I'm out of ideas on the rest. Is there any way I can trade-in the generous support of the moral variety for technical support? I presume, since it is "much more valuable" it would trade-in with at least a 1.5 ratio, no?

[The Dopefish]

14 hours ago, von Ozbourne said:

You seem to be knocking these out pretty well on your own.
In lieu of having time to actually help, I will offer up the much more valuable support of the moral variety.
You are ever the most welcome.

doing the heavy lifting if we're being honest

[kingraph]

Do you have a location of the ref and faceoff overlay graphics?  Like, any tile will do.  What I would suggest, and I can try to do this, is to see if we can find the header of that faceoff and ref overlay graphics.  It should be located at the beginning of those graphics.  IF we find that, we can probably find where in the ROM that graphic is called up, maybe a pointer.  From there, we can investigate and see if there is an x/y location part of the graphic which is found in the menu, clock, etc.  

[AdamCatalyst]

Thanks so much. I really appreciate any time you put into this. Here is what I know:
 

Face-Off Window Background / Tiles

Original @
0x055BF6 / 0x055BFE

32 Team (De-compressed) @
0x11E2AA / 0x11E2B2

Referenced @
0x00FB90 / 0x00FB1E & 0x016D10

 

Face-Off Window Players & Linesman / Tiles

Original @
0x0A78AE / 0x0A78B6

32 Team (De-compressed) @
0x011EA88 / 0x011EA90

Referenced @
0x01606A / 0x00FB2E & 0x016D02

 

Linesmen & Referee

Original & 30/32 (compressed) @
0x05C408
 

Edited August 18 by AdamCatalyst

[kingraph]

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.

[AdamCatalyst]

On 8/19/2024 at 4:06 PM, kingraph said:

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.

I noticed something. I can move the box that appears underneath the Face-Off window, which contains the text indicating which lines are on the ice. The interesting thing about this, is that they are positioned in blocks relative to the top left point of the Face-off window. This leads me to believe that there is a larger overlay being written, with the Face-off window loaded into/onto it at registration point 0/0. All conjecture though. FYI:

Face-Off Lines Y Position @
0xFBC5

Face-Off Lines box height @
0xFBCB

Face-Off Lines Text @
0xFBEB
 

---

To be clear, what we are working on here, is working towards a 100% wide mode fix for '94 ROMs, with enough R&D that others will be able to adapt to modded ROMs+. Was hoping to publish it this fall, but as you can tell, I got stuck. I can't promise anything, but I wouldn't be reaching out to others if I hadn't already invested serious time with this making serious progress. There are three known issues that I've not been able to broach:

- Face-Off window on right side needs to be moved further right past the 256 pixel limit.

- Refs position could be adjusted to better fit visual balance of 320 pixel screen. Lowest importance.

- Sideboards view when a Penalty is being called displays in 320 wide mode, despite being a 256 wide fixed graphic. Completely unimportant if one plays with Penalties off, but leads to video garbage with Penalties on. There is already a fix in place to toggle the pause screen back to 256 pixel view, while gameplay toggles back to 320 pixel view. This last one seems to be the most elusive fix, as I can't find where that screen gets called up. I hadn't asked the community here about this, as I was hoping to be able to fix it with the original Russian developer, but no such luck so far. I will post this in the OP at the top.

Edited November 29 by AdamCatalyst
updates

[kingraph]

5 hours ago, AdamCatalyst said:

 

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)