bruddog

Hey blueman- You do a great job with the sim editing and everything else but I tend to disagree quite a bit with your ratings. Which is why I'm working on my own ratings. I did a 2001 rom but looking back I felt there were a lot of areas where I messed up. For the 2002-2003 season I think my rom will be much much better in terms of player ratings. For me what matters most is that in MAN vs MAN situation the teams are as representative as possible of how their real life counterparts are. Taking the Stephen Davis example above. Even if he was the xth rated in TSBM i can tell you that 31 ms would make him much much below that in a man vs man game. HP just doesn't make that much difference in man vs man game. One notch in MS is about equivalent to about 60-70 in terms of HP at least in a man vs man matchup. Defense is THE hardest thing to get right and figure out the real story. For example just b/c a team gives up alot of rush yards doesn't mean that there rush D was bad if the average yards per carry allowed wa low. It could be that they just had a lot of rush attempts against them perhapps b/c the offense was so bad that the D was on the field constantly. As for defensive players I have formulas that I apply but players always need tweaking since tackles are very somewhat misleading but is one of the only thigns to go off of. PAsses defenced should be factored into INT ratings sometimes depending on the total INT's of the team defense. Also player positioning can be key as to how the team would play in a MAN situation. I will probably write a detailed breakdown when I release (hopefully in the next week or two) my 20002-2003 rom which will prob piggy back onto the sim code and schedule work done by you.

It all depends on situation, but I would say more often than not punting is not the best choice specifically when behind. 1. 4th down conversions have a pretty high sucess rate unless the yardage required is signifigant, or a very good D vs a very bad O. 2. Your number of opportunities in Tecmo are limited due to how fast the time runs. I am normally a go for it guy. However, that being said I once punted in overtime on 4th and 8 in online play at around the 45 or so. His guy fumbled the punt and I recovered and went in for the score.

The only caveat with the emulator is that if you could find a way to merge different movie files together you could keep retrying from the save states to get the best possible #'s.

Quickness and AOP do nothing. At least when run in nesticle. Unless there was an inaccurate dump of the original code from the cartridge quickness and AOP appear to do nothing. From a pure gameplay standpoint, I have played many games where I set all my defensive guys to 06 and set my qb's AOP to 06 as well as the positive extreme and couldn't tell one lick of difference between the 06's and the 94ers. Having two ROM's with different BALL control will definitely cause the game to "go out of sync" in online play. Here is another way I've tested it: I have many recorded games from league play. I have had many games where there have been fumbles i the game. Going back into the rom and giving a guy that fumbled 100BC sometimes causes him not to fumble and casue the rest of the game to play back improperly...because its "out of sync." However in testing MANY, MANY games where I changed th QB's AOP to 06 I have never ever seen the movie play back differently. Same with Quickness. I think people just have to accept that it doesn't do anything at least in MAN vs MAN. I've done some inconclusive testing that suggests it MAY have an efffect in COM vs COM mode. Back to fumbling. My theory on how it works is like you stated but with a twist. I think everytime two players come in contact a random number gets generated that determines whether there is a possible fumble event. If this comes back positive, then there is another number generated that is compared to some combination of the defensive players hitting power and the offensive players BC. Testing of this theory through the movie method seems to hold as often times it will take quite awhile for the ROM to desync suggesting that possible fumble events come up fairly rarely.

Allowing lurching radically reduces the pass play slection as you can lurch every non-shotgun pass play with a very high sucess rate given an average speed QB. So that means you are down to the shotgun plays. I contend that the pass 2 shotgun play is pretty much worthless against a MAN opponent. I'm not sure how many run plays if any are immune to lurching from one of DL, but as stated above the fun factor of the game drops considerably. Player Sub- I just have a problem using WR at RB since in a real game a fast WR would not be NEARLY as effective as they are in Tecmo. I've never heard of anyone that doesn't allow for changing plays in a MAN vs MAN setting.

Well this is a very open ended question. Even just given the choices above. I think I would go with choice B. Though white has fumbleitis his 50 ms is much less of a difference than the difference in PC between Moon and Harbaugh. Obviously we are not factoring WR's into the mix b/c another reason Harbuagh is so bad is that his WR's aren't worth shit either. But with White you can at least minimize his fumbles by running out of bounds wheneever possible.

Actually I always thought the reason to run clock was not because you had a poor offense but because you had a poor defense. I mean say you get the ball with 4:00 left and you could score in a minute leaving the other guy with 2:30 or so left after the kickoff. Thats a lot of time if you have a crap defense. And you don't even necessarily change your style that much. Just make sure not to run out of bounds. Even wasting an extra minute or so is huge. But I am usually of the philosophy that it is better to score when you can and trust your defense to make the stop.

In league play where you are allowed to move your guys anywhere and tend to have at least one good DB and LB, the inside LB and safety spots seem to be the best. Playing at the corner spot is more easily abused by certain plays. With a good inside LB you can neutralize just about any run play a majority of time.

Uh, if your are talking about the pro power sweeps down those are some of the easiest plays to lurch either with the NT or the bottom DE. Not to mention those plays are easily stuffed by almost all the LB spots.

Lurching would be more acceptable if it didn't 1 Didn't cause such a limitation of the playbook. On non shotgun pass plays if you practice you can pretty much gaurantee a sack on any average speed qb about 95% of the time. 2. Forget running any run play from the two set back formation. The defense would be picking your play about 33% of the time as you would be left to choosing from the two shotgun plays or run 3 to have any hope of getting significant yardage. Thats worse odds than the original tecmo bowl and wouldn't be nearly as fun.

I know someone found how to hard code it into the rom as its been done in league play but it would take some digging to find it.

Illigit no. Annoying at times.....yes. I tend not to play that way, but have used it at times. But it can definitely backfire on you. One time someone was trying to run out clock on me in a tie game in the 4th driving down the field but I got a turnover and drove and scored and it left them with little time left since they had been running down the clock. I believe that in league play you should do whatever it takes that is within the rules of the game. In a "pick-up" type game I would consider punting, deep bombs, and running the clock on every play pretty weak.

I think the key is to start off using stats only and then go back and tweak from there. I think the most important thing is too make sure the relative strengths of the teams make sense. And that the teams strengths and weaknesses are displayed properly.

You can check the rom hacking section as there should be posts by ROD and I already regarding play modification. All the play modification stuff was found months ago. I'm not as much of a guru regading the graphics though.To me that is the most time consuming thing but I may not be using the right program. As far as chaning the plays, I'll break it down simply from easiest to hardest as far as playbook hacks. What you need: Some kind of hex editor. 1. The easiest thing to do is to change the formation of an existing play to another exsisting formation. Ex. Have the R&S sweep play run out of the pro T formation. 2. The next easiest thing to do is to move plays into different slots. By this I mean you could make sure there is a shotgun play for every pass slot. The important thing to note is that putting run plays in pass slots does not work. Ex (you could put the redgun pass play in slot 1) 3. Make new formations by using exsisiting player formations. Basicallly you can create any formation by using the platyer locations in existing formations. 4. Make new plays by using exsiting routes and blocking assignments. All of the above can produce good results as well as disatrous results. There hasn't been enough testing on a lot of stuff. But with good common sense you can usually make a play that works. But this brings me to my next point.....defense Another important side effect of changing plays is that the defense may not react properly. In some instances where I changed running plays the defense wouldn't come after my guy until I passed the line of scrimmage or sometimes not at all. You have to watch out for wierd stuff like that. You need to know how defense reacts to certain plays so that you know what kind of D to put into your play. And I don't think anyone has really documented how defense reacts to plays. We know ONE section of code that controls that. All I'm saying is that you don't want to create a play that will basically never be stopped by the defense. Next... this asssumes that you have posts the section on how to modify play routes. Lets say that you give WR#1 a slant route that is a two part pattern....(straight for two yards and then slant) and move him to a strange place in the formation. I think with how the play coding works...he will try to go to the first location befor slanting. So say you put him on the bottom of the formation and the original location for the slant route was on the top. He will run from the bottom location to the top location and then slant. So you have an entirely new route in this case. Where before he went straight and then slanted he now goes vertically up the field and then slants. Also as far as modifying pass plays you have to make sure that if you switch routes that all the receivers are still selectable. Editing the plays is very time consuming using a hex editor. It would be helpful to have some kind of tool for all of the locations we know about already. Especially for the graphics portion.

More like 2500 and 12.5. But feel free to exaggerate. Its all good B-hump was the man with 41 Td's.

Of course against the computer you can do whatever you want but against a MAN opponent I think it kind of throws things out of whack. Off the top of my head this would benefit passing teams with no running game the most. It doesn't really work the tother way around. PHI, SF, and HOU,MIA become much stronger than they already are. I don't think the programmers intended Houston to have a strong running game but by putting Givins in they now have a much more fearsome running game especially not having to worry about White's fumbles. The reason I see RB at WR as much more acceptable is that in the NFL RB's frequently go out for patterns while WR's do ont frequently run the ball. Plus most of the RB's are hampered by thier low REC ability in Tecmo whereas the low HP is really a hamper to WR's playing RB in man games. As far as kick returning, again subbing a faster player in doesn't really give you an advantage because ms isn't used on kick returns. Otherwise gil fenerty wouldn't be the god that he is. And as far as the Eagles being easy to defend without a running game. You must be crazy! With a 56MS QB your offense should be just about unstoppable. Even if you pick the passing play Eagles can escape the rush. Sometimes it is even advantageous to the player with Eagles if this happens as more guys will be open. To recap I would play a man game either way but I think it is better when WR's can not be substituted at RB. Well let me clarify...you can put a WR at a RB spot as long as you don't intend to run with him in order to utilize a 4/5WR offense.

I use a playstatoin controller with a PSX to USB adapter.

I believe section 6000-78something has even more to do with how the plays work but this is an even bigger sectoin of code than the previous one I found. If anyone wants to give it a shot here you go. My assumption is that the plays here might be divided up into 64 byte chunks but I could be wrong.

Back in the day when my three freinds and I used to have tournaments we would do the following. Roll a dice to see who got the first, second, etc pick. This would be repeated for as many teams as we were using in the tourney. Usually this would be about 4 each. No teams were off limits. Occasionally for a few tournaments we only played using the worst teams Indy, NE etc. One thing that I thought was unique was that we would sim the season to about week 6 before picking our teams to randomize the players conditions. And you weren't allowed to look at them before picking. Then we would roll dice again to determine the mtachups for all the brackets. I think we went through 30 tournaments or so. I remeber winning one tournament with Cleveland thanks to an excellent QB Browns/Minnifield/ and Webster Slaughter. We would record all the Championships and keep track of the championship game statistics. The funniest thing was that we didn't know you could change plays till after our first tournament when someone finally opened the instruction manual.

Da Beerz, Have you ever played againsta man opponent with a fast qb. trust me they are fast enough to do damage.

Thats some good shit jeid. Very very close to how I think my ratings would have come out. Not too many complaints. The only thing I can think of is possibly even bumping up hp for culpepper and mcanir even a bit more as those two qbs are absolute beasts to tackle. Also is culpepper really faster than mcnabb and culpepper? I'm just curious. There were a few other things but overall very solid. I'm sure some will have a problem with penningon being so highly rated. Its tough for him because the stats say one thing but I'm not sure if the stats tell the whole sotry in this case. Not that I would bumb him down much but maybe just a tad along with trent green as well. Good work on the passing speeds though. I heard that pennington has a pretty weak arm. For me I think offense is fairly easy to rate. Defense is much trickier and takes a lot more tweaking and some more in depth look at the stats. As far as the grading system. When I made my rom last time I actually had the original players stats on the side to see how many 81 PA there were, etc. To make sure I got the balance roughly right.

My opinion is that Henry should be of the 56-63 MS variety with Lorenzo white ball control.

Actually in tsb 50 is by far the most common with few above and below. The loewst bc is 31 i believe for lorenzo white. But the difference between 81 BC and 31 is not as big as the numbers would have you believe which is why I think there should be a team ball control based on that teams turnover ratio. Then the individual players ball control could be tweaked a bit form there. The problem is there are really only 3 guys whose ball control is going to matter so they shouldn't be modified that much. Its a tough call.

Nameless echoes my sentiments exactly.

38 REC is pretty harsh. I mean I really don't think he's that bad. And second of all the worst of starting WR's in the original had about 50 REC. 63 would be closer to the ballpark.