TSB 2027 BASE [STANDARD]
Project Announcement
If you’ve played enough Tecmo, you’ve seen it. Once in a blue moon the game just stops. Music dies, players freeze, and that’s that. No pattern. No explanation. It’s been in there since 1991 and everybody just lived with it.
We think we found it. More on that below.
First, the announcement: we’re building a new base ROM. The goal is a standard — one clean foundation the whole community can build off of going forward.
What’s going in:
- All 32 NFL teams
- The real 18-week season with authentic bye weeks
- 2pt conversion
- Up to date with today’s NFL rulebook — extra points snapped from the 15, kickoff touchbacks out to the 35, and every spot rule in the game checked against the current book
- Original TSB gameplay — no feel changes, period
- An expanded ROM with real free space for future development
Quick word on how those middle items live together: original feel, current rulebook. If a change touches how the game feels in your hands, it’s out. If it just makes the game match today’s NFL — where the ball comes out, how the season runs — it’s in. People will expect that from a modern base, and they should. These updates are tiny, a few bytes each. Anything bigger has to live in the new space, which brings us to the big one.
The big one is that last item: room.
The original ROM is full. It’s been full for years. Every hack you’ve ever pasted in had to fight for scraps of leftover space, and the big ideas — the ones that need real estate — either squeezed into somebody else’s territory or never got built. We’re doubling the program space using the same proven method the classic 2007 expanded ROMs used, and attaching one simple rule to the new space: original banks stay original, new hacks get new room, and everything gets written down.
One caveat, and it’s a project of its own: some of the existing hacks this build depends on will need to move into that new space to make the rule true — the 2pt conversion patch is the big one. That work is mapped and underway.
And here’s the part that’s for everybody: as we go, we’re cataloging the hacks — proper notes on what each one does and where it lives, updated SET commands that actually work on the new layout, and IPS files to match. One library, current and correct, for anyone building on this base moving forward. No more guessing whether a ten-year-old forum post still applies. Every rule value we set gets documented as a dial, too — the address, the byte, what it means — so if your league wants touchbacks at the 20 or the extra point back at the 2, you can set your copy up in seconds.
Why do this now?
Because 35 years of hacks add up. Everybody shares SET commands, everybody stacks them on everybody else’s work, and nobody’s keeping the map. We found hacks sitting on top of other hacks. We found a master list entry that would quietly wipe out the 2pt patch if you ever pasted it again. We even found a hack that was accidentally protecting a bug — remove it correctly and the game crashes. None of that is anyone’s fault. That’s just what happens with a hundred authors and no blueprint.
So the real product here isn’t just a ROM. It’s the ROM plus the map: a verified family tree from the 1991 original through cx_rom’s 32-team work, through the TBorg base thread, through the 18-week edit and Suede Wade’s 2pt conversion patch, all the way to this build. Every ancestor archived and checksummed. Props to everyone whose work is in this chain — this project stands on it.
Who’s “we”?
Worth being straight about this: “we” is me and Claude, Anthropic’s AI. I run the tests, make the calls, and keep us honest about how the game should feel. Claude does the deep code work — reading the disassembly, tracing bytes, running simulations, catching things I’d never find by hand.
Two things made this project possible, and people should know both. One is bruddog releasing his source code disassembly of the game — that’s the map that turned guesswork into engineering. The other is the AI itself. The byte-level detective work you’ll read about in these updates — verifying 35 years of lineage, auditing every seam of the 2pt patch, cornering a bug measured in millionths of a second — that’s not something one person does in a spare evening. Without it, this isn’t possible. Credit where it’s due, on both counts.
About that freeze.
Short version: Tecmo has a tiny task scheduler inside it — a little traffic cop juggling the animations, the clock, the music. Genuinely impressive for 1991. But there’s a gap in it about twelve millionths of a second wide. If an interrupt lands exactly there, the game can lock up. Miss the gap and nothing happens. That’s why nobody could ever reproduce it — it’s a coin flip with brutal odds, flipped thousands of times a game.
We’ve mapped the machinery and photographed one crash in the act. Right now an automated test rig is rebooting the game over and over, hunting for the next one. When we catch it clean, we fix it at the source.
If the fix holds, the oldest bug in Tecmo goes away. Not patched around. Gone.
Where things stand:
- Freeze hunt: trap is running
- Clean core build: done, waiting on the fix
- Rulebook updates: XP from the 15 and touchbacks at the 35 are in; full spot-rule audit underway
- 2pt patch audit: complete — no landmines in the patch itself
- Hack catalog: started, growing with every audit pass
- Family tree archive: complete, 1991 to today
- ROM expansion: proven method ready and tested, queued after the fix
More updates as we go.