NHL '94 Stats glitch

[TruePensFan1981]

I don't know if this is common knowledge or not among NHL '94 gamers; however, I've known about it all these years because I experienced it very quickly:

When I was a kid, I remember scoring a goal with my goaltender in NHL '94 to win 10-0; however, the player stats said my goalie allowed one goal (even though I had a shutout victory).

I just had a random thought about that glitch tonight, and I began to wonder if that is something that can easily be fixed via hex editing, or if source code would be needed to address that (assuming it can be fixed at all).

[clockwise]

We were talking about this on AIM and never heard of it so I decided to give it a try. All of the skaters and the goalie were removed from Anaheim's top line; just Oates and Moog were on for Boston so I could do it fast.

TPF is right, here's the results:

[smozoma]

I think this would be harder to fix than one might initially think.

Back in the day, every byte of memory counted, so wherever possible, wasted memory was avoided. The Genesis had just 64kb (65536 bytes) of main RAM.

All players, including goalies, have a 4 bytes of memory allocated to them for stats: Goals, Assists, Shots, Penalties. That's 4 bytes x 24 players x 2 teams = 192 bytes. That's 0.3% of the total RAM available. That doesn't sound like a lot, but try thinking of it as 1/333rd of the RAM, and I think it looks more significant, when you consider that you need the rest of that RAM to keep track of the player positions and speeds, their AI states, the puck position, how excited the crowd is, 10 seconds of instant replay, etc.

For the goalies, those Goal and Shot bytes are used for Goals Against and Shots Against. However, when you score a goal with anyone (player or goalie), they get +1 Goal and +1 Shot.. but those end up being displayed as Goals Against and Shots Against. Whoops. For an extra 2 bytes per player, this problem could have been avoided, but then 0.45% of the RAM is taken by these stats (1/222nd)... I guess someone made the decision that they'd rather have the 96 bytes than the accurate stats. That was 96 extra bytes they could use for something else, such as adding new features in NHL 95.

If EA would release the source code to this ancient game, we could fix a lot of these little problems.. but unfortunately I don't think EA is that kind of company