World Juniors 2025

[Sean]

🎵 Everybody wants to rule the world... 🎵

I've had World Juniors-fever for the last few months since I secured tickets to this year's medal rounds in Ottawa, and I wanted to share my take on a World Juniors ROM for 2025. This is going to be a living, breathing thing as the tournament approaches, but I felt it best to share now since it's playable.

Features/what to expect

• This pre-tournament version features rosters based on expert roster projections and any selection lists submitted by the 10 Top Division teams. Numbers, lines, and player cards are preliminary. I will release updates as the major contenders' rosters become public and final.
• Custom music from my NCAA project is back, with some small tweaks.
• Crowd colors are hacked to feature the teams playing in the game, with a small edge for home teams.
• 0-6 player rating scale, Option 5 on SmozRom for hot/cold (all stats, accurate ratings)
• Although this is a neutral site tournament... let's be honest. The Canadians are at home. Every team has home/away advantages tweaked to a level I thought would be appropriate, with everyone except Canada weak at home.
• Because the tournament features only 10 teams, the playoff draws are set up so that unselectable versions of other teams will appear on the other side of the bracket. This is set up so you can't play the same team twice. Not a bug, don't worry.
• Ratings based on performance over the current and previous seasons, plus scouting reports. Full disclosure... I haven't seen all of these players play, especially the ones in small European leagues, so you might disagree with some of them if you follow certain teams/prospects.

Credit to the following great resources

• AdamCatalyst for his constant improvements to the game, especially his recent wide patch which this ROM comes default with (credit McMarkis and Chaos for their help on that thread)
• Drezz for his amazing graphics editing improvements
• JKline, Von Ozbourne, Sauce, and other ROM hackers who have shared specific things that pushed the game forward
• Smozoma for his countless hacking tools and guides
• wboy and Slapshot67 for their great work figuring out this game's inner workings
• + I'm sure many more that I am surely forgetting

Planned updates:

• To make it an even 16 teams, I'll be including the Division IA teams at some point. Congrats to Denmark on earning the promotion to the top division next year just earlier today though!
• I'm a huge fan of the tournament's history, so I plan to add some historic teams at some point. Who wouldn't love to see the '05 Canadians (Crosby + Co.) go toe-to-toe with the '89 Soviets (Mogilny-Fedorov-Bure), '93 Swedes (Forsberg-Naslund), or '24 Americans?

Download here!

WJC2025v1.5.bin

 

 

Edited January 1 by Sean
1.5 released

[Sauce]

Nice work @Sean!

[AdamCatalyst]

Awesome!!!! Every time I play one of your ROMs, I think it myself, man, I really should have people wearing the home team's colours in the stands, but I have no time for that, because I am playing your ROM instead.

Edited December 16, 2024 by AdamCatalyst

[Sean]

20 hours ago, AdamCatalyst said:

Awesome!!!! Every time I play one of your ROMs, I think it myself, man, I really should have people wearing the home team's colours in the stands, but I have no time for that, because I am playing your ROM instead.

Thanks!

I sadly don’t have a handy patch to make it easy or anything… I probably should’ve had better hygiene when I was working on the crowd project originally. 

It does have some compromises in other areas but I enjoy it and I’m happy to hear other people do too!

[McMarkis]

Some really nice touches to this ROM. Love the intermission music, and the crowd colors look great.

[BurntBiscuit94]

Great ROM!  Thanks for doing this!

[Sean]

Hi all!

V0.7 has been posted.

Updates are...

• Cleaned up some stray pixels in the rink and player sprites resulting from my colored crowd and colored glove hacks
• Penalties restored to 2-minute length
• Stamina and recovery tweaked, I wanna make you think about line changes more!
• Ratings tuned, rosters updated for CAN, USA, CZE, SWE, FIN to reflect official tournament website. 5 other teams will be handled closer to tournament, and lines will be kept up after preliminary round.

EDIT: now all of the stray pixels in the rink are fixed.

Edited December 21, 2024 by Sean

[BigIron]

I’m a fan of the little details. First thing I noticed is the dashers are actually RED! but also 3 coaching staff on each bench? Looks like 2 coaches and a trainer and even a colour commentator between benches? All while changing the crowd colours accordingly to each team and while keeping net cams and adding custom music.

Great work!, now that the WJC is on I find myself playing this ROM quite a lot! Looking forward to future updates for sure. 

[Sean]

11 hours ago, BigIron said:

I’m a fan of the little details. First thing I noticed is the dashers are actually RED! but also 3 coaching staff on each bench? Looks like 2 coaches and a trainer and even a colour commentator between benches? All while changing the crowd colours accordingly to each team and while keeping net cams and adding custom music.

Great work!, now that the WJC is on I find myself playing this ROM quite a lot! Looking forward to future updates for sure. 

Thanks! I've just released an update with much more accurate lines and #s for every team, so hopefully, it scratches your itch tonight since the games stop at 3:30.

[Sean]

Version 1.0 is out, featuring:

• more bug-hunting
• an updated widescreen patch from AdamCatalyst
• Accurate lines and #s for teams per Steven Ellis' Twitter updates
• ratings bumps and nerfs for some players who I've been able to see live more via pre-tournament and early games

Enjoy!

[Sean]

Re-uploaded because I did something and it said unavailable on one of the buttons to download. My bad.

[AdamCatalyst]

Gonna try it out today!

[l o f i - poutine]

I just experienced a crash where I turned off all the rules, Sweden v Canada, and right after a check was made in my zone the game threw an error. It might be an errant edge case or just a random crash. Just wanted to report it.

 

im playing on a native sega Genesis using a mega Everdrive v3 using the most recent OS version.

[Sean]

On 12/29/2024 at 11:17 AM, l o f i - poutine said:

I just experienced a crash where I turned off all the rules, Sweden v Canada, and right after a check was made in my zone the game threw an error. It might be an errant edge case or just a random crash. Just wanted to report it.

 

im playing on a native sega Genesis using a mega Everdrive v3 using the most recent OS version.

That 1A5EA byte has been an ongoing thing in 32-team ROMs for a little while, I’m not sure if anyone has come up with a fix at some point. I know that AC has said he’s encountered it before, I notice it about 1/25 or less games playing my ROM, a bit more often when I’m in playoff mode.

Maybe I’ll chase after it when we get back from Ottawa next week. 

Might be fixed? Going to stress test it some more. But just did 20 some odd demos and never saw it.

Edited December 31, 2024 by Sean

[Sean]

1.1 has been uploaded, with 4 small tweaks I felt worth making before final day of Group Play:

• Carter George stocks go up, Trey Augustine stocks go down
• Canada wears their red uniforms in "away" games now, as they are in the tournament
• May have patched out the 1A5EA address crash? Not 1000% sure? After making a code tweak and 25+ simmed demo games it hasn't happened again for me yet. I'm sure it'll happen for the first game someone else plays though... just how these things go LOL. Ran into it earlier this morning, but have had trouble reproducing it in an environment with a tracer to try and work backwards on it.
• Matthew Schaefer is out of Canada's lineup, but you may put him in at the Edit Lines screen if you see fit

Edited January 1 by Sean

[l o f i - poutine]

2 minutes ago, Sean said:

1.1 has been uploaded, with 4 small tweaks I felt worth making before final day of Group Play:

• Carter George stocks go up, Trey Augustine stocks go down
• Canada wears their red uniforms in "away" games now, as they are in the tournament
• May have patched out the 1A5EA address crash? Not 1000% sure? After making a code tweak and 25+ simmed demo games it hasn't happened again for me yet. I'm sure it'll happen for the first game someone else plays though... just how these things go LOL
• Matthew Schaefer is out of Canada's lineup, but you may put him in at the Edit Lines screen if you see fit

Gonna try this out as soon as I can.

[von Ozbourne]

21 hours ago, Sean said:

Matthew Schaefer is out of Canada's lineup, but you may put him in at the Edit Lines screen if you see fit

Ah, if only that could work for the real Canadian team... Although, at risk of making a soon to be dated comment, after that Latvia game, the real test starts tonight.

  

On 12/15/2024 at 7:35 PM, Sean said:

Although this is a neutral site tournament... let's be honest. The Canadians are at home.

I haven't had a chance to examine this, but after watching some of the other games, you really can see how the local fans get behind teams like the underdog Latvians or how the crowd went nuts cheering for Finland [perhaps also against the U.S.] Any thoughts on giving some teams a bump in this regard?

 

Edited December 31, 2024 by von Ozbourne

[Sean]

One final update before I leave for Ottawa in 30 mins:

• Ratings bumps and nerfs for some more players
• More authentic bracket match-ups (note: you still will need to win 4 games rather than the typical 3 at the WJC, because of NHL 94's playoff size)
• Still hunting that annoying 1A5EA crash. I couldn't recreate it in Gens when doing a trace, but it's there on RetroArch and real hardware AFAIK, so will need to do some more debugging when I get back. 

Per @von Ozbourne's suggestion, some tweaks to H/A to punish less reward teams that the crowd has taken as a fan favorite, along with other team ratings tweaks.

WJC2025v1.5.bin

Edited January 8 by Sean

[AdamCatalyst]

I'm the seventh one to download this? WTF, this needs way more love! Thanks for putting this out and keeping it so up-to-date Sean! It's been a fun treat to play along with the tournament.

[Sean]

4 hours ago, AdamCatalyst said:

I'm the seventh one to download this? WTF, this needs way more love! Thanks for putting this out and keeping it so up-to-date Sean! It's been a fun treat to play along with the tournament.

Thanks for the support!

I’ve done 5 or so little updates since the start, so the download #s are a bit skewed to the bottom, which I don’t mind. Anything above 0 is good enough for me and makes it worth the time!

[Sean]

Hey all, back from Ottawa. It was wonderful, thank you to our friends up north for being great hosts.

Still chasing the 1A5EA bug, seems like it could have something to do with sounds based on the disassembly and trace logs in that area of the ROM. Maybe an overflow of memory or something, I dunno. I've had difficulty recreating it in the Gens emulators with tracer tools, so it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on.

For now, I have managed to avoid crashes by disabling this setting under Emulation Hacks on RetroArch. It hasn't caused any issues in anything else for me, but has saved some time on not needing to restart my ROM once in a blue moon.

Still exploring more permanent solutions, and I will keep you updated