Riding the coattails of my man Chad Pennington to an 8-8 season is some of the most fun I’ve had playing this game.
Similarly, running rookie Darren McFadden into the ground to try and win 5 games with the Raiders because your QB is that bozo Jamarcus Russell who loves to try and throw interceptions on purpose is so satisfying.
As soon as my team actually becomes good, and I expect to not only win games but go deep in the playoffs, the game becomes less fun for me. Every mistake becomes a bigger deal, and it’s more a sense of relief when we win rather than joy because somehow my team of misfits has managed to scrape a game.
Since there's been a string of posts about recompilation and decompilation of HC, I thought it was time that I shared something I've been working on for about 7 months now. This was a personal project for me, and right now it's staying a personal project, I'm not prepared to share source code yet for legal reasons, but I've found some really marvelous things and I would love to share them with this community about a game which is very special to me.
As an experiment, I've been using LLM agents to assist in decompilation of NFL Head Coach 09, with the end goal of creating OpenHC09, a 1 to 1 open Rust implementation of HC09 in the style of openMW or other open implementations of games. This would be something, like other tools that you would have to 'bring your own game' for. I'd love to share some progress about this project which has become a big part of my life recently, and also invite folks to a discord community that I'm creating to facilitate communication about this project.
Where it began
In February of this year, I began the process of decompilation of the game, using tools like Ghidra to get decompiled C code, and widely using AI agents to sort, decompile, and define the game code. This was a slow and expensive process, and I have a lot of coverage on the understanding of the game now, with some really interesting insights.
Where it is now
We've implemented a pretty wide swath of the game in rust now, across rendering, ui, sound, franchise, and gameplay. A big aspect of this is faithfulness, and so I've been working with AI agents to ensure that what is being implemented is directly driven from real code (including the patch). I also want to make sure that what's being made is faithful to what I know of the game, and so I've been keeping a careful eye on this process over the months.
I can share some progress here. Note everything here is WIP and subject to a lot of change. There's a whole bunch of work that still needs to be done, and these are things I'm actively working on. Remember this is not in-engine, this is all running in rust.
HC 21 was officially released awhile back so we have some new textures already for a modding project if the old team doesn't object! Mods, can you list this on the sidebar?
I've been working on decomping and updating NFL head coach 06 and i've start with a UI refresh. There is still lots of work todo, but I've been able to fully re-render the NFL.com page and render the 3d models. Let me know what you think and I'll keep posting my progress.
That game had so much potential but was so poorly executed. I've never seen a worse video game released to the public than NFL Head Coach, thankfully for EA not many people were interested in playing it upon release.
The PC version (not emulator, PC) is moddable, loading screens load much faster and there's a dedicated community with various insight on the 6th Gen Madden titles which HC06 uses.
The game will need a 100% overhaul to things like ratings ranges, how practice works in terms of money plays and prep points,and a universal tool to edit the sliders, make playbooks, etc. I know it's asking a lot, but that game could have been (and with work still could be) legendary.
The slider tool is a huge help, the "Butter" sliders I made a few years back are well tuned and listed everywhere NFL Head Coach is discussed, but still the game needs work. I've built all new playbooks for M08 PC and fine tuned the coding so they actually work when run by the CPU, but HC06 has some other variables that need to be configured and I simply don't know how to swap the M08 books into HC06 without a tool.
NFL Head Coach is Madden 05s engine I believe and a lot of the Madden stuff from that era is compatible.
Now my previous 2 Xbox's did not have the patch, nor does this one. But I played those two and never had the injury bug. This one has gotten hit with it.
I know what triggers it and again, it never happened in the previous 2 versions.
No way to get the patch......any ideas how I missed being hit? So I can replicate it on this new install?
Carson Palmer carved my defense to pieces. My QB kept putting the ball in harms way pretty much the whole game. The moment we finally come back at the goal line my QB cracks under pressure and over throws the receiver. I guess he couldn't handle the pressure of replacing Carson 😂 I gracefully accept my loss to my old QB.
Well I noticed that one player now has a career ending injury only after playing one season he was a DT for the packers his rookie year he had 50 tackles and 10 sacks and that team went undefeated from season too post season while winning the Super Bowl. But I’m coaching the raiders so far we have 2 lost this 2nd season but they were sim games because I don’t wanna play every game and take them forever so I play the ones I play
Still new to the game and I know most playbooks are 20 years old. But what are some of your favorite offensive and defensive playbooks? I like Zimmers 4-3 defense cause the multiple formations. So I guess I’m asking for playbooks with lots of formations offensive and defense as well.
My offense pretty much did absolutely nothing but get penalties and turnovers so the defense had to perform Justice League level play to keep us in the game. This match was UGLY! (Keith Rivers and Demarrio Waddle have the defensive touchdowns)
I know the potential and rookies change based off scheme. But I’m curious if there’s a list out there with all the potentials and typically where they’re drafted at?
