# Credits and provenance

Current r5: the boot card waits indefinitely for Start. Its old automatic timeout is superseded; A/B/C and directions do not skip it. See AI_ATTACK.md for tests.

Updated 2026-10-28. The boot card is a summary; this page records contribution scope.

## Original game and immediate base

NHL 94: **EA Sports**. Our immediate input hack is **NHL 2026 - 94 Edition v5.1W**,
by **Jkline3 and von Ozbourne**. Original release and its full acknowledgements:
https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/37144-nhl26-94-edition/#comment-211439

The input used here is the wide-screen v5.1W (original MD5
`8f863ecb108c1d213953bada9b98f4f2`), not the narrow version. The authors credit
**Drezz** for presentation/background work, **slapshot67** for player-card work,
**AdamCatalyst** for team-color pucks, **chaos** for weight/checking changes,
**smozoma** for rating consistency/goalie range, **clockwise** for Y-goalie work,
and **McMarkis** for the one-/two-goal CPU goalie pull. These describe inherited
work, not new code claimed by this project. The base thread also discusses
**TheTome**'s any-position Edit Lines hack; its presence varies by edition, so
we do not claim to have imported that feature into this build.

## Research used for our changes

- **abdulahmad / NHL94Genesis**: https://github.com/abdulahmad/NHL94Genesis —
  community disassembly, routine names, flags and engine code used to analyze
  the October 28 forum reports. Its README also acknowledges chaos, StaticEck,
  McMarkis, Drezz, smozoma and kingraph; see that project's own credits.
- **Chaos81 / nhl94-disassembly**: https://github.com/Chaos81/nhl94-disassembly —
  annotated reference used earlier (see EXPERIMENTAL_BUILD.md).
- **Tickenest / NHL94MatchViewer**:
  https://github.com/nhl94dotcom/NHL94MatchViewer/blob/main/docs/GENESIS_MECHANICS.md —
  mechanics research and the forum's gameplay bug list. The release patches
  our v5.1W input; it is not a build or port of either disassembly repository.
- NHL94.com documentation, including the player-card tutorial linked in
  PLAYER_CARDS.md. Feedback: **77**, **Tickenest**, **bcrt2000**, **Brodeur30**,
  and **floating**; the project thread is
  https://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/40511-2-guys-one-ai/

## This project's additions and material

**jdc** directs gameplay/design; **jdc and Bodin** playtest. **Claude and Codex**
assist with implementation, engine investigation, headless tests and documentation.
New season schedules, persistence, statistics browsers and documented gameplay/UI
patches are in tools/season/ and tools/experimental/; CHANGELOG.md records their
history. No claim is made to authorship of the original game or base hack.

NHL roster/player/headshot data comes from the NHL; DailyFaceoff supplied line
references (see roster JSON and PLAYER_CARDS.md). Crit sound: a digital sample
adapted from **Twin Cobra** (Toaplan), not newly composed audio; see
CRITICAL_SLAP.md for exact source sample/extraction. Build/test tools include
SGDK/GNU m68k binutils, Genesis Plus GX/libretro, RetroArch, MAME, Python and Pillow.
The new startup card is text rendered with DejaVu Sans Mono; its generator and
native renderer are published, and link back to these full credits.

Some original presentation has been replaced by jdc's startup/menu picture and
new cards. We retain the base acknowledgements here and show a boot credit card
rather than silently attributing inherited work to jdc or an AI assistant.