Real Pro Tennis Tour

Jimmy Connors Real Pro Tennis Tour

Real players, real faces, for Jimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour on the Super Nintendo.

The field is sixteen players deep, and only Connors is real - the other fifteen are invented. MUELLER, WURZL, BAECKER, KRAUSE, PAPOU - placeholder names standing in for the real tour, because the game only ever licensed Connors himself. The portraits, the ratings and the flags were all drawn from real players from that time; only the names were changed.

This hack puts the real names back, fixes the flags that were wrong, and redraws portraits.

The player menu showing CONNORS with a USA flag, his portrait and the description GOOD ALL-AROUND PLAYER
The player menu, with the name, flag and portrait all agreeing

The roster

Every player keeps the portrait, rating and playing style the developers gave them. The name and, where it was wrong, the flag are what change.

#In the originalFlagNow
1CONNORSUSACONNORS
2MUELLERGermanyBECKER
3AKIRAJapanMATSUOKA
4OHARAUSAMCENROE
5WURZLSwitzerlandHLASEK
6EDSONSwedenEDBERG
7BARNABYUSAAGASSI
8PAPOUFranceLECONTE
9NILSONSwedenWILANDER
10WIJNFORTNetherlandsKRAJICEK
11PANSASpainSANCHEZ
12CARLOSSpainBRUGUERA
13BAECKERGermanySTEEB
14KRAUSEGermanySTICH
15ORGULFranceFORGET
16TANAKAJapan → USACHANG

Each slot actually carries two name strings, and both are restored: the surname above, which is what the menus show, and a full name the game prints elsewhere - JIMMY CONNORS, BORIS BECKER, CARL-UWE STEEB, MICHAEL STICH and so on.

Slot 16 is the one exception. TANAKA is not a disguised player at all - the portrait is an older bald man in glasses, a developer cameo. With no real player to restore, the slot became Michael Chang and its flag was changed from Japan to USA to match.

Nobody is left with a made-up name, and nobody is left flying the wrong flag.

The pre-match panel: Connors against Becker, both with their new portraits
The pre-match panel. Slot 2 was MUELLER in the original.

Portraits

All sixteen portraits are new, and all sixteen are derived from photographs of the real player - reduced to the game's own 32×32 cell and its own eleven-colour tan ramp. Not one portrait is the developers' original art any more.

Three of the new portraits: Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg and Andre Agassi
Three of the sixteen. The technical overview has the full roster.

Each one is tuned on its own: a photograph's exposure, its contrast and the colour of the player's hair all decide where its tones have to land in an eleven-step ramp, and a single setting applied to all sixteen turns the fair-haired players to mud and the dark-haired ones to a silhouette. Every head is scaled by the width of its face rather than its hair, so all sixteen heads come out the same size, and anchored on the chin, so no chin is ever clipped - hair gives way at the top of the frame instead.

Seven individual 8×8 tiles took extra work, and they are corners rather than faces. In the original, five of the sixteen cells do not store all sixteen of their tiles: a plain frame-and-background corner is stored once and the screen's tile map points several portraits at that same copy, which is why those five show a neighbour's corner in the unmodified game. This release fixes it - the seven tiles are appended and the tilemap repointed, so every cell owns all sixteen of its own. The technical overview has the detail.

Also fixed

  • The coaching tip text. The game's own advice screen names a player - it read MUELLER HAS… and now reads BECKER HAS…, so the prose agrees with the roster.
  • Slot 16's flag, as above.

Not changed

  • The five coaches keep their names. Nick Bollettieri aside, they are not disguised real people.
  • There are no other players to change. The sixteen are the entire field - the game stores no further player names, so every tournament opponent is one of the roster.
  • Ratings, playing styles, physics and every other aspect of the game are untouched.

Credit

This exists because of the French patch Vrais Noms v1.0 (romhacking.net hack 9815), which did this for the French release. That patch does not apply to the USA ROM, and it was not complete: some slots kept invented names, several flags stayed wrong, and one portrait was attributed to the wrong player - the man labelled Stich is not Stich, and the slot the French patch left as a fake name is.

So this is not a port of that patch. The roster was re-derived from the ROM itself - from the flags, the portraits and the ratings - and checked player by player.

Applying the patch

Apply the IPS patch to an unmodified USA ROM.

Base ROMAfter patching
FileJimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour (USA).sfcJimmy Connors Real Pro Tennis Tour (USA).sfc
Size524,288 bytes, no copier header524,288 bytes
CRC32913F15554F08DBBC
MD5106290995E3295B9D13C888E806A491AD824CA41C7B8F882C110043F8083029E
SHA-11C1B57AD8C62F66DEFCE8CA9C6E087153E3469992C97EA061598F4382DF7BD33A3F1A9B05F9BF49B

The patch is 15,652 bytes, MD5 DA1F91ADC6BE588DB965CC542649A753. Confirm your ROM matches the base hashes before applying it and verify the result against the patched hashes afterwards. Distribute the IPS patch only, never the patched ROM.

Read the technical overview →