Heres some Snes News:

Eskayelle has issued his Double Z Mod of the SNES classic, NBA Jam – Tournament Edition . A project two summers in the making, the hack started innocently with the discovery of Mattrizzle’s Player Portrait Replacement Tutorial and various correspondence regarding NBA Jam Hacks on the RHDN forums. Armed with this information, the initial game plan was to add Michael Jordan to the ROM, and perhaps himself and a few friends.
Learning more and more about ROM hacking, eskayelle expanded the hack to hex, text, and portrait editing (version 1), then tiles and sprites (version 2), moving into ASM hacking in his latest iteration (version 3).
Since then, the Double Z Mod has become a quintessential “Roaring ‘90s” hack, with several secret characters from the era inserted, including:

  • Hulk Hogan
  • “The Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels
  • David Hasselhoff
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • O.J. Simpson
  • Bo Jackson – with Tecmo Bowl-esque speed!

Correspondingly, the team order has been updated to follow the season and playoff standings for the 1992-93 NBA season, with Chicago updated for the 1996 72-10 Chicago Bulls roster and Detroit stacked with the Motor City Bad Boys. Additionally, the Rookies team has been replaced by the 1992 Team USA squad, the Dream Team, from players, to logo, to team name, to uniform palette!
Meanwhile some bugs present in the original game have been resolved:

  • The Grand Champions attract mode screen will now display certain players who have beaten all 27 teams, depending on their wins tally.
  • The injury stats will reset at tip-off of every game, ensuring that the same teams/same lineups will not experience a carry-over of injury tallies from game 1 to game 2.

With a readme that provides detailed steps regarding the process for updating the original ROM, and a fair amount of credit to some great hackers and utility developers, the game has gone from a personal hack just for fun to a proof in concept and potential tutorial document for other would-be NBA Jam TE hackers. Writes eskayelle, “Writing the readme in this manner helped me track progress and revert the ROM back to certain versions when a bug or a bad crash was encountered. It could be a good tool for anyone out there who’d like to hack the game… maybe it’ll encourage a group to consider an annual team/roster update, akin to what’s currently being done for Tecmo Bowl. I’d love to help some folks get something like that off the ground, or just share some of the other data I’ve been accumulating about the game. It’d be great to share that info with folks new to hacking or some veterans – perhaps they could help teach me a few things about sound pointers and BRR replacements.”
If you’re up for a good game of Jam or want to peruse the other features changed, please head over to http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4097/. Constructive criticism is more than welcome, and – if you’d like to provide some mentoring on hacking ASM, sounds, etc. – or if you’d like more information on the hack or the original ROM to assist in your own efforts, please feel free to PM eskayelle directly or sound off in the forums.

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4097/