One of my favorite retro sports games is Ice Hockey for the NES. This game gets overlooked because it's on the simplistic side and not tied to a real-life franchise, but it's still a good time.

I started getting into watching hockey streaming so I've been playing this game as something to do during intermission or when waiting for the game to start. One thing led to another and I ended up making a romhack to change the sprites over to be female looking.

Before:

After:

Some more gameplay

Here's a demo of using the tool for simple task of crossing-out the puck sprite

Instead of crossing out the puck I made other changes to the sprites of course, and used this tool to import them back into the ROM.

Ultimately it may have been possible to use someone's already-made tool in lieu of making a new one. I tried one, YY-CHR since it's popular. But, I had problems getting it to understand externally-pasted or externally-imported images, and YY-CHR's built-in image editor was not sufficient for my workflow. If that one didn't pan out, it may not bode well for the others. Since I was familiar with the image formats it was not too much to simply make a new thing.

About this game's mechanic, if you aren't familiar- this is 4-on-4 hockey. Skater players come in three varieties: light, medium and heavy.

• The light skater is fast but has a weak shot and can be knocked over easily.
• The heavy skater is slow but has a strong shot and tends not to get knocked over.
• And, the medium skater is in the middle.

You pick what type your 4 players should be. A typical game involves a balance of skaters, although ultimately it's up to you.

The players, ref, goalie and zamboni driver are edited. 👍

To play it you don't need to use the tool, of course. I'm posting a patch so you can just patch your ROM.

Click here to download the patch (IPS). Patch was created using LunarIPS. LunarIPS is also recommended for applying patches. Apply the patch to an unzipped, NA release ROM, size 40976 bytes. Don't hesitate to contact me if you want to play but don't know how any of this works, I'll set you up.

And click here to download the source spritesheets if you want them for some reason.

If you want to change the sprites to fit your own creative inspiration, you too can use the tool I made, posted to GitHub here.

Update (1/15/2020): Fixed missing bun in one frame of heavy player animation, fixed back-of-ref's-head-during-penalty animation