NHL Series (98, 99, 2000, 2001, 2002)

[DSgamby]

I got all of them working now. Hopefully.

2000 needed to be XP SP3.
2001 and 2002 needs to be 95.

2002, the main menu, the cursor is very slow but the menus after that are fine.

Everything else works fine.

I also got 98 to work.  Compatibility and Admin not checked either.

[NHL98 Lover]

So I've been playing around with direct sound wrappers to use in NHL 98. I didn't bother with Alchemy cause it seemed like an overly complicated mess - including parts of the install that popped as a virus.

I did find one wrapper that manipulated the games sound, but it didn't fix the problem in my experimentation. The program is called DirectSound Control (http://www.bockholdt.com/dsc/installation.html). It allows you to manipulate parts of the dsound API for compatibility purposes. It was one of the only wrappers that seemed to have an effect in the game, but it didn't fix the problem of skipping / choppy audio. I didn't test it to the point of exhaustion, so it's possible that the right configuration might improve if not fix the problem.

It's worth noting. If we could find the right wrapper it would be an easy fix. Drop a new dsound.dll in the game directory and all would be well (assuming that's were the problem lies).

[NHL 98 Lover]

Feb 11, 2017 13:10:22 GMT -5 DSgamby said:

I got all of them working now. Hopefully.

2000 needed to be XP SP3.
2001 and 2002 needs to be 95.

2002, the main menu, the cursor is very slow but the menus after that are fine.

Everything else works fine.

I also got 98 to work.  Compatibility and Admin not checked either.

Yah I got NHL 98 to work on two 32bit XP boxes with no compatibility problems at all. I think the sound issues come up post directx 9.1.

[Matt]

DS -- Great stuff. Thanks so much for your info - I'm going to be rewriting all the guides this week and all of that is going to be helpful.

[Roberto]

Hi Matt,

thanks for sharing. Now it works. My ISO have to be broken or something.
Problem is solved now. You can delete post with ISO. Thank you.

Robert

[Matt]

Thanks Rob, glad it worked.

[johan]

Dear Matt

I have 4 GB RAM but because its WinXP its 3.

I installed nGlide and ran the patch exe and it ran at a normal pace. It was still ugly until i remembered to enable 3D acceleration. Now it's as pretty as things could be in 98. I also remembered the huge problem with NHL 98 was that you can never pass backwards to your defenders in offensive zone. They are never there. Never!

I dont actually know if i installed the database patch or not, but when I asked my first question I had not. Not sure if the site you link to still has the download. Cant see anything to download.

[Matt]

Hi Johan,

I was in the middle of overhauling the 98 page today so I might have messed something up. Should be good now but if the game is running fine I wouldn't change a thing.

And yeah, 98 was one of those games where you always wanted to be going forwards. It has an odd challenge to it -- every time I pick it up again seems like I can't score; then it's like I remember how and start getting them in bunches.

Best way to score is on the power play -- pass across the goal line for a stuff in at the side.

[Matt]

NHL 98 Lover (or anyone), can you try placing this dsound.dll in your NHL 98 folder and let me know how the sound is?

dsound.dll

Thanks.

[Heinisch]

Dear Matt,
Game is running but every time i do a normal game the game throw me back on desktop..i just can play tutorials! How can i fix that problem?
greetz
Heinisch

[Heinisch]

sry i talked about NHL 2000!!

[Matt]

Greetings Heinisch,

Sounds like it might be the problem someone else had a couple pages back -- try turning off the color commentary in sound options and see if it still crashes.

Have you any idea what language version the CD might be? I think you can check -- if you open the setup folder on your CD, one of the subfolders should tell you the language.

[Heinisch]

Hey Matt,
Excuse my late answer... setup language is German!

[Matt]

No worries. Try adding this key to the registry.

Heinisch Registry Key

If it does what it's supposed to do, it will change the game interface to German. Not sure this is the fix as I can't test on a German language CD, but I'm basing it on a post someone left for me a while back:

"I installed the game following your instructions, and everything appeared to work out fine, but I also had to use a nhl2k patch/crack I'd got before to execute the nhl2k.exe.

Tbh I've found it even more pretty cool that I got the English user interface now instead of the German one. But the language option in the modified registry-file for the drive must be named as the language folder of the cd-rom because of the sound.

Otherwise the game will freeze and crash when the commentary starts (nonetheless you turn it down in the sound options).

So I edited the registry file and modified the language entry to

"Language"="[.\SETUP\'LANGUAGE']" or as in my specific case to "Language"="german".



Now I got the distribution interface and (poor) commentary, but the game also runs stable."

[NHL 98 Lover]

Feb 17, 2017 0:51:51 GMT -5 Matt said:

NHL 98 Lover (or anyone), can you try placing this dsound.dll in your NHL 98 folder and let me know how the sound is?

dsound.dll

Thanks.

Matt-

That seems to have done it!  I just tried it on Windows 10 and the sound seems great.  So, where did you get this mystery dsound.dll? 

I would update your site.  It seems to have done the trick for me.  Nice!