While working on some mods I got a little sidetracked with this project and was curious to see if I could increase the number of teams from 32 to a full 34 teams using wboy's notes from way back.

The short answer - I did it.

As you can see while scrolling through the team list, the Eastern and Western Allstar teams were added - and after a month of messing with this, it's alive.

I used chaos' Fight patched version of NHL 94. Stock graphics, stock rosters etc. The only thing that was changed was the title screen and the fly in logos as well as the expanded ROM to 3MB.

Now - this is still VERY much a WIP. I haven't gone through the playoffs or had any save data used yet. I also haven't looked to deeply into Freeze bugs etc. I just did a few basic things that AdamCatalyst had pointed out a while back. As you can see, I just did some quick and dirty graphics to make this like a conversion to NHL26, but I haven't done proper rosters, photos, arena tweaks etc. This is just barebones stuff cobbled from a number of ROMS in order to fill space for testing. There's stuff from the Fight ROM, wboy's OG 30-team NHL 94, vonOz and JKline's 32 team NHL 26 mod inside it.

Once I get it to a playable state, I'll throw it up here for funzies, along with my documented notes, that will give you an idea how to go about the long laborious process of adding teams.

One interesting thing - I had to go back to the OLD school method of tiling the images and reusing tiles, using a tilemap etc in order to conserve space. 32 teams seemed to be the maximum for the reconstructed decompressed banners, but going back to the reused banner formats, you can add a few more teams that way. I am currently going to look into how far you can go with it - I have two versions of banners with reduced width fonts.

Anyway - this is coming along and it's working so far - just need to put it through it's paces.

Lol, I just finished my 34 team 2mb ROM. was going to release this weekend.

Do it! We need base templates! I was considering a 36 team one, adding the 4 Nations teams in there but I didn't want to get too greedy LOL

I started a 36 team rom, but stopped halfway through. I will finish it eventually

so with the banner limitations a rom Beyond 36 teams is possible but I also ran into a problem with the adding more free bytes to rosters.

You have to use Adam Catalyst's method of fixed bytes for each roster, then move the roster to a different block altogether.

NOSE is only set up to deal with an expanded 2MB rom, and it grabs the free bytes, but doesn't realize that you can go beyond that to create more teams so you have to do it by hand - AND the fixed bytes method breaks NOSE so you have to do it all by hand.

Edited May 28May 28 by Drezz

@Drezz That's amazing!!! Thank-you so much!