NBA Jam 2K20 PSone Mod

[resurrecta]

That's one dope commercial right there!!!
I have never seen that effect even though it mimmics the same one used in the fatality of NBA Jam TE's 1.0 to 2.1.
I noticed that even the on fire effect is slightly different in the video...

I get what you want to do with that stop motion... But I'm assuming it's intended to eventually run in Unity?

It could be it's unused... Too bad it's one of the few we don't have in really nice quality.

[ponlork]

oh no im going to try it in my next update. I got a idea on how i can possibly add two separate body sprites using this color cycling technique. i notice the palette for the body sprites are 256 colors, but when i extracted the body sprites it only uses 64 colors. you explained to me more about how it works in previous posts. im not really sure yet but i was thinking maybe i can reserve 192 colors for the Kaine body, i would have to strategically place the pixels so that i can make it work. Like the pixels for Kaine will be unique colors, that way i can make it transparent so it wont show when selecting a Male player.

the main problem im thinking about is the filesize. Since it's a RNC compressed file, and i will be adding more pixels in to the body sprites to create the female art, i assume the filesize is going to be bigger when i compress them. So im going to see if i can rebuild the disc to take into account the bigger size, or i may just have to replace the body sprite with female and not be able to have both. Or possibly i can reduce the color to 32 colors to fit both sprites i dont know.

im just fantasizing not even sure if my idea will work. if it works and the idea is popular i'm going to pitch it to Chris Kirby lol and maybe i would attempt to build it from scratch with unity. But first im going to try it for NBA Jam 22 ver1.5

[ponlork]

Hey y'all, i finally submitted ver 1.4. hopefully it'll be available later today. i could have released it sooner but i spent an entire month working on the trailer lol

i told myself i wasn't going to make anymore of these AMV style trailers but Naruto is one of my favorite anime characters so i felt inspired to put more effort into it. It's not public yet but here's the trailer if anyone is interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFKcWwtxBBA

I've also added James Harden as a last minute addition


only thing left to do now is to write a news article on it and then im gonna take a long ass break. well not too long, i would like to make another update for the finals

[resurrecta]

Hey y'all, i finally submitted ver 1.4. hopefully it'll be available later today. i could have released it sooner but i spent an entire month working on the trailer lol

i told myself i wasn't going to make anymore of these AMV style trailers but Naruto is one of my favorite anime characters so i felt inspired to put more effort into it. It's not public yet but here's the trailer if anyone is interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFKcWwtxBBA

I've also added James Harden as a last minute addition


only thing left to do now is to write a news article on it and then im gonna take a long ass break. well not too long, i would like to make another update for the finals

I was finally to take some time to test it today.
As usual this is a great update... It's very interesting to see most line ups to be more modern and more and more complete.
Harden plays great here... The head fix is extremely interesting. I remember doing Bart Simpson with Mattrizzle and finding the size limits a bit annoying. Now, a much better head could be created. Also the same goes for the MK ninjas... Only Raiden, I'm not sure about because it's both height AND width in his case.

Regardless, it looks really well. One thing though, when I play with LaVine, I'm really noticing the difference with his head and skin color tone... Perhaps there's a closer option?

Also, I'm thinking it's not too hard to create more modern jersey palettes? I mean, I have messed with the edit... But I dunno how you insert them.

[ponlork]

thanks for checking it out. hopefully i'll have another update by the finals. i'm going to replace the Rookies team with the Memphis Grizzlies next and add Ja Morant in which might be problematic due to his hair, which is similar to the problem you had with Bart Simpson. It looks okay in big head mode but at default his head would appear too small.

I had a idea of making some hidden players only accessible by Gameshark. i was looking at the nba jam TCRF page and there are some Hidden players like Sprite Boy and Kita who you need a gameshark to unlock. and i thought with a gameshark we could probably enter codes so that only that hidden player's head is resized so that way the other players wont be affected.

as for the skin tones, i plan on experimenting with that next. i believe it's even possible to manipulate the palette in a way so that certain teams can have their own distinctive jersey, like maybe for the Bucks they can have their logo in the front of the jersey.

im also going to adjust the head alignments later too. right now im just chillin and i took another look at NBA Hangtime again for the PSX

[resurrecta]

thanks for checking it out. hopefully i'll have another update by the finals. i'm going to replace the Rookies team with the Memphis Grizzlies next and add Ja Morant in which might be problematic due to his hair, which is similar to the problem you had with Bart Simpson. It looks okay in big head mode but at default his head would appear too small.

I had a idea of making some hidden players only accessible by Gameshark. i was looking at the nba jam TCRF page and there are some Hidden players like Sprite Boy and Kita who you need a gameshark to unlock. and i thought with a gameshark we could probably enter codes so that only that hidden player's head is resized so that way the other players wont be affected.

as for the skin tones, i plan on experimenting with that next. i believe it's even possible to manipulate the palette in a way so that certain teams can have their own distinctive jersey, like maybe for the Bucks they can have their logo in the front of the jersey.

im also going to adjust the head alignments later too. right now im just chillin and i took another look at NBA Hangtime again for the PSX

Well, to not lengthen the conversation over nothing... I'm just not sure how the Gameshark codes would work, I mean specifically when using emulation.. But from where I'm sitting that's all hard to tell because I don't know what heads get affected and so on... At least, I like the custom work you did here... It opens up the door for some missing arcade exclusives...

That said... I'm a pretty decent spriter and from unpacking the sprites, I'm not even sure if jerseys with a logo are possible without editing every single sprite and pointing to it as a seperate file/spriteset... The way I'm looking at it, especially considering the psx iso, is that it's an extreme effort for a small gain since you should probably consider every team to have a consistent result...

However, yeah... some obvious jersey pal's make sense. Like Brooklyn having the same set both normal as alt (in Jam terms) as the Spurs. And creating a custom one for the Sonics to become the OKC and so on....

Anyhow, this 1.4 is big step up... It's feeling more and more like a "full product".

[ponlork]

Well, to not lengthen the conversation over nothing... I'm just not sure how the Gameshark codes would work, I mean specifically when using emulation.. But from where I'm sitting that's all hard to tell because I don't know what heads get affected and so on... At least, I like the custom work you did here... It opens up the door for some missing arcade exclusives...

That said... I'm a pretty decent spriter and from unpacking the sprites, I'm not even sure if jerseys with a logo are possible without editing every single sprite and pointing to it as a seperate file/spriteset... The way I'm looking at it, especially considering the psx iso, is that it's an extreme effort for a small gain since you should probably consider every team to have a consistent result...

However, yeah... some obvious jersey pal's make sense. Like Brooklyn having the same set both normal as alt (in Jam terms) as the Spurs. And creating a custom one for the Sonics to become the OKC and so on....

Anyhow, this 1.4 is big step up... It's feeling more and more like a "full product".

i'm the type of person who rarely uses cheats unless it's to unlock some things so i dont have much experience in using these type of codes but i believe it's possible to use gameshark codes in retroarch. I remember using it once to get this cardcaptor sakura tetris game working: https://www.reddit.com/r/PlaystationClassic/comments/cw1lxz/has_anyone_got_tetris_with_card_captor_sakura/

i recall you can create cheat files in notepad, and simply load the cheat in retroarch. so i imagine we just have to find where those memory addresses are that handle the head size and it'll work. then there's memory editor programs like cheatengine or artmoney that will work too. I know it's possible to resize just a specific player's head by editing the ram, i did it accidently before lol just need to find those memory addresses again.

yeah im not even sure if my palette idea will even work. i would like to try it though as a proof of concept. i imagine it'll require extensive work cuz i'll have to manually modify every frame in the game. might even be able to get Raiden's electricity animation effect with this idea.

i got some good news and bad news, i looked at NBA Hangime again and i found exactly where the heads are stored, the bad news is i couldnt figure out how to decompress it. im gonna hit up the xentax and zenhax forums later and ask for some help lol

but yeah there's a BIGLUMP.BIN file on the disc and at offset D1000 is where the heads start. It goes by team names in alphabetical order so the first team is the Atlanta Hawks and the first player is Dikembe Mutombo.

The first head is the back head, then at D1100 is the upright head, then at D1260 is the perfect sideview. i haven't gone much further but i know those are the heads because i blank out some rows with zeros and it shows up corrupted in the game. And i also copied the back head code and replaced it with the perfect sideview and it shows up though it looks a bit disjointed but i can see it.

i did some googling for BIGLUMP.BIN and there's another game that uses this file name called SpongeBob SquarePants: SuperSponge and the source code is available online: https://github.com/hazelcode/SBSPSS

it's also programmed by Gary Liddon who did NBA hangtime as well so i imagine the same tools and compression methods were used. there's a tool on there called LZNP.exe which decompresses lznp files. i tried it and it decompressed something but i couldn't get any image to display. if anybody is interested in doing some detective work on it then please do lol hopefully someone will be able to crack it

[resurrecta]

I see your point about Raiden... Yes, a lightning effect joined onto the sprites is a way around it.
In the arcade, it's just an overlayed effect that displays on top... Fundamentally, extremely easy but I dunno if such a code exists in PSX.
However PSX has Rodman and Magic Hair having the color changing hair which the arcade didn't have at all.

Speaking on Hangtime... I'll try to mess with it a little bit during the weekend.. I'm no genious but perhaps luck favors the bold.
At some point, I really don't care too much about tweaking Hangtime PSX but it does contain some exclusive heads, not found in any arcade version; Kobe Bryant being one of the obvious.

No one ever mentions though on how good a replica NHL Open Ice was on the PSX...

[ponlork]

hey y'all, these past few weeks i've been digging in the NBA Jam source code. i really wasn't planning on hacking anything i just wanted to tinker around and glance at a few things. but then i saw a reference to Michael Jordan in the mugshot file


then i thought holy shit, maybe MJ is left in there. and i scrambled to try and get his photo to display


then turns out, there's portraits for Jordan, Gary Payton, and head sprites for Ken Griffey Jr


there's also a portrait for Magic Johnson which is where i assume the Double Z mod got the assets from a year ago. Well i attempted to re-insert Jordan's portrait in the game and voila


you may notice his portrait looks a bit skewed in the raw assets but it's corrected when playing in Mame. I assume it has something to do with analog CRT displays, like how back in the day when we try to rip DVD movies to our PC the resolution appear wider at 720x480 but it looks correct when resized to 640x480.

Well one thing lead to another and i started trying to edit other things including the player names, skin color, height, attributes, and the in-game heads:






and that's where i'm at right now, the player heads. it took a few days for the heads to even display correctly, though the palette came out wrong. i'm going to have to edit each color value bit by bit. BJ Armstrong has 128 colors, from what i've observed, the player heads range from 64-128 colors. most only have about 64 though. The PSX head sprites are identical to the arcade however the palette and head sizes are all fixed at 32x32 256 colors whereas in the arcade, they crop out all the empty space so the dimensions may vary. That might be problematic when trying to insert players with afros and beards.

the good news is there are some players who have larger head dimensions such as Raiden, Mark Turmell, Kerri Hoskins, Kong, and a few more i cant recall. So i could add a selective list of players who require a bigger canvas, however for this mod i think im just going to add Michael Jordan and Shaq and call it a day.

but yeah, just wanted to post about it in case anybody is interested. i'm hoping to drop the hack soon, hopefully in a few weeks if there arent any unexpected surprises
May 18, 2022, 07:00:19 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
finally got jordan's head to display properly




it takes roughly a hour for me to get a head angle in, (not counting creating the art for it) which is still long but more manageable now. im just glad i dont have to do the palette by hand, that took me 12 hours the other day and it still came out a mess lol

one downside of the Arcade ver is the players are scaled smaller so their heads may look scrunched up. I might have to switch to a more pixel art style to make it look more consistent. i suppose one workaround is to give Jordan a big head at default, or maybe i can increase the default size for all players

[ponlork]

I submitted the Arcade hack. It's pending approval. i decided to name it NBA Jam Rewind:


Here's a trailer for it:

Last thing i need to do is write up a news article. after that im taking a vacation lol

[ponlork]

It's out now: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6989/

[isittheshoes]

ponlork, I've been following the project over the past few months and I'm really impressed at the level of modding you've done, not just for the PSX, but also for the Arcade version for NBA Jam Rewind!

If you need any Kitzrow commentary samples from NBA Jam On Fire, let me know. Kitzrow recorded 11872 clips (at least for the PS3 version!).

I think I read earlier in the thread that you needed a clean Lebron Kitzrow sample. I can provide those or any of the player callouts to you. Let me know!

[resurrecta]

Is there any chance the roster can get further updates?