Michael Capewell .com

Email address: mcapewell [at] gmail [dot] com

About

Most of my site was made between 1997-2002. The hockey-related stuff was added in 2005-2006, the last time I did a 'big' update — it looks like I'll have to change the player names in that background image on the left! Spezza from Alfredsson and Gonchar! Or Kessel from Versteeg and Bozak, now that there might be something to cheer about in Leaf Land?

I haven't done much with this site lately because I've been putting my spare time into my video game league at www.Blitz94.com. Now I primarily just update my programming projects and, as of the end of June, my resume page

Updates

2010-Jun-29

EARE, my editor for NHL'94 on the Sega Genesis, reached v1.0 at the start of this month. It is meant to be used alongside the NOSE editor, which hasn't been updated in a few years and doesn't incorporate some of the newer game mods that have been discovered.

A couple months ago, I spent a week figuring out how to modify the machine code for Super Nintendo games then unveiled my first creation for that platform: a 52-team version of NHLPA'93. The original had just 26 teams.

52 teams corresponds to the maximum number of decompressed team banner graphics that will fit in one of the SNES's 8kb data banks along with the associated palette and tile map.

After not touching the game for a while, I spent this past Sunday figuring out how to decompress the NHLPA'93 graphics so that people can create customized team name graphics for the 52-team ROM. Though I was able to get the game to read and display decompressed graphics (I had to write a machine code routine to copy data straight from ROM to RAM, bypassing decompression), I ran into a bit of a roadblock: increasing the size of the team banner graphic from 26 to 52 teams makes other graphics in the game get overwritten in Video RAM when the game is executing. Whoops. It'll take some more work to shift the other graphics around, plus there seemed to be some graphics memory addressing limitation that will limit the size of the graphic, since it was unable to display the banners for the last 4 teams.

2010-Jan-13

Wow, I haven't updated this site in ages.

A lot of my free time programming for the past couple years has been related to the old Sega Genesis hockey video game, NHL '94:

www.Blitz94.com is an online league I run where about 30 people draft teams and play each other in NHL'94. The website tracks all the game statistics. Sign up!
The Weight Bug Fix is a hack in the 68000 machine code of the game, in order to fix an imbalance in the way checking was handled (heavy guys were weak, and the 'checking' attribute had no bearing on checking effectiveness). The fix creates a lot more depth in the types of players that are useful and fun to play with. I also fixed a bug in the way assists were handed.
EARE is an editor that allows you to modify some other features of the game (ones not covered by the amazing NOSE editor by wboy)

New Stuff