Tag Archives: March Modness

As I try to ease myself back into tackling larger modding projects, one of my goals is to create smaller mods that are quicker to complete. To that end, my latest release for March Modness 2023 is a pack of custom blank portraits for NBA Live 2005-08. This mod was originally made using NBA Live 06’s files, but it should work with all four of those games.

In short, these portraits replace the default “No Portrait Available” placeholder for all players who don’t have a portrait file. I’ve taken the blank portraits from NBA Live 95, 96, 98, 99, 2000, and 2001 PC, so needless to say, credit to the old art teams at EA Sports for the original designs! As I’ve discussed before, I have a ton of nostalgia for the portraits in NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96 in particular.

A quick note: if a player has been assigned a custom face file and are missing a portrait, they won’t use the default “No Portrait Available” placeholder. These custom blank portraits will only work for players who are set to use the default placeholder (including created players), though they could also be repurposed as placeholders for specific players. Feel free to do so; if you do, a word of thanks in the credits would be most appreciated!

Download the pack here! For links to my NBA Live 2005-08 mod release and support topics, check out the signature in my NLSC Forum profile. Stay tuned for more March Modness releases, and don’t forget to join in the fun for your chance to win a copy of NBA 2K24 PC later this year!

One of my goals when tinkering with old favourites is to try and devise fixes for my fellow retro basketball gamers. To that end, I’ve been able to put together a fix for the bug/design flaw with training in Dynasty Mode in NBA Live 2004.

For those who may not remember, assigning less than 20% of the available training time to any of the four areas (Shooting, Defense, Offense, and Conditioning) in pre-season training camp or in-season training sessions would result in your players’ ratings declining. As such, the only way to see significant improvement in one area meant weathering a drop in ratings in another.

This issue was fixed in NBA Live 2005, but as it turns out, it can easily be resolved in NBA Live 2004 as well! The ratings increases and decreases relative to the assigned time are stored in DBF files, and it’s easy enough to remove all the negative values (and thus the nerfs). With this fix, training your players in Dynasty Mode in NBA Live 2004 will only ever result in ratings increasing, as long as you assign enough training time. Otherwise, player ratings will remain static until the offseason. Players will still improve and decline as normal as they develop between seasons.

Download the fix here, and find the support topic here! For the moment, I’ve left the default increases and thresholds intact, but it would be possible to make it easier (or indeed, harder) to increase ratings through training camp and training sessions, as well as change the size of the increases. It’s definitely satisfying to resolve this issue, even if it is going on twenty years later! I’m hoping to release more of these little mods and fixes throughout March Modness 2023, so stay tuned.

While I didn’t found the NLSC, I’ve been around since almost the beginning. When my family finally got the internet in 1997, I went looking for sites related to my interests, which obviously included basketball and basketball gaming. One of those Altavista searches brought me to the NLSC, where I discovered updated rosters for NBA Live 96 PC.

As I’ve said when reminiscing in various articles, this was a mind-blowing discovery! I was soon drawn into the hobby of modding – then called patching – and began making my own rosters for NBA Live 96 PC. To that end, on top of being one of my all-time favourite basketball games, NBA Live 96 PC is special to me because it brought me to this community, and introduced me to a new hobby.

I’m celebrating that love of NBA Live 96 PC and my community “origin story” with a couple of new releases for March Modness: a Draft roster, and a Jersey roster. The Draft roster places all original players on the teams that drafted them, or in a couple of cases, debuted with after going undrafted. The Jersey roster places all original players on the teams that match the jersey they’re wearing in their portrait. This has resulted in some wild fantasy lineups for retro gaming fun!

Download the Draft roster here, and the Jersey roster here. Additional details can be found below, and I’ve also created a support topic here in the NBA Live Vintage section of the Forum. For more information on getting NBA Live 96 to run using DOSBox, please see this guide. I’ll be tinkering with other projects throughout the month, but in the meantime, please enjoy this throwback as March Modness 2023 gets underway!

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Welcome to March here at the NLSC, and the sixth annual March Modness! In case you’re unfamiliar with the event, throughout the month of March, we’re celebrating our modding community. Needless to say, modding is a big part of what we do all year round, but March Modness is a time to reflect on the hobby, and get even more productive and creative!

As usual, this also includes a giveaway. If you upload a mod for any basketball game to our Downloads section during March, and include “March Modness” in the description, you’re automatically in the draw to win a copy of NBA 2K24 PC later this year (full terms and conditions can be found below). Congratulations once again to last year’s winner, kobedurant!

You’ll also want to keep an eye out for my regular features throughout the month. I’ll be discussing some topics related to modding in Monday Tip-Off and The Friday Five, as well as taking a look back at some classic mods and modding tools in Wayback Wednesday. I’ve also got a couple of mod releases of my own lined up, and will be spending some further time in the “workshop”.

I’m looking forward to celebrating modding, seeing what our talented community creates, and getting in on the fun myself throughout March. A big thanks as always to everyone who contributes to our modding community!

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #466 of the NLSC Podcast!

Despite undoubtedly being a classic release, NBA Jam Tournament Edition features some weird ratings. We’re spotlighting some of the most egregious examples, and speculating on how they might’ve come about. Needless to say, Yinka Dare gets a mention! We’ve also got plans for March Modness, which will be tipping off in a couple of days. As we always like to do, we recap our recent sessions on the virtual hardwood, including updates on our progress in MyCAREER and MyLEAGUE. This also leads to a potentially controversial comparison of NBA Live 06 and NBA 2K6 for Xbox 360! In this week’s mailbag, we join the community in sharing our ideal gaming experiences, from preferred modes to how we get set up to play.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:16:08 — 52.6MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

Congratulations to kobedurant, winner of our March Modness 2022 giveaway! kobedurant contributed some great jersey updates during March, and continues to do some fantastic work for NBA 2K22. As previously noted, his prize is a copy of the standard edition of NBA 2K23 PC. Details on the game are sure to be coming within the next few months, and we’ll of course be covering the preview season here at the NLSC.

A big thanks as always to everyone who entered this year’s March Modness contest, and continues to share their mods with our community! Don’t forget that we offer free and permanent file hosting for our modding community, in order to preserve these great releases for years to come. Whether you’re modding NBA 2K22, an older favourite like NBA 2K14, or indeed a very old NBA Live game, I encourage everyone to make use of our facilities. For more information on uploading and adding files to our Downloads database, be sure to check out this tutorial.

Check out the latest mod releases for NBA 2K22! We have 21 new mods in the Downloads section today, including player faces and portraits, custom courts, jersey updates, rosters, shoes, and a Next Gen reshade. You can find all of the download links for today’s NBA 2K22 mod releases at the links below.

As I noted when I announced this year’s March Modness, we’re rebranding our “File Additions” bulletins to “Mod Releases”. It’s a change we’re making to move with the times, and to remove any ambiguity there might have been with what we meant by “File Additions”. Don’t forget that you can enter a giveaway for a copy of NBA 2K23 PC by uploading your work to our Downloads database all through March! For more information including the full terms and conditions, please see the March Modness 2022 announcement.

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to our Downloads database! If you need help uploading files, be sure to check out this video tutorial. For more information about downloads, the modding community, and Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

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For my first contribution to March Modness 2022, I’ve released a new version (v3.1) of my 1996 Season Mod for NBA Live 2004 PC! It’s an overdue update as the last release came in 2018 – also to tip off March Modness that year – and there have been some changes I’ve been meaning to make.

Most notably, since several people have suggested it, I’ve removed the setup file in favour of a manual installation. Installing the mod is now just a matter of extracting the included folders to the appropriate places. The installation routine was originally intended to do this automatically, but it seemed to place files in the wrong folders more often than not. Please see the readme file for detailed instructions!

I’ve also included a pre-modified xstartup.cfg file, just in case you have trouble enabling CustomArt; a necessary step to use the mod, and any other NBA Live 2004 projects that utilise custom art files. If you’ve already enabled CustomArt or are confident in editing the config file yourself, you can skip this step.

Download the 1996 Season Mod for NBA Live 2004 PC here, and check out the release/support topic here in the Forum! This probably won’t be the last time that I touch this project, as I’m sure I can find a few other enhancements to implement beyond making the installation process easier. Thank you to everyone who has still expressed interest in this mod all these years later!

It’s that time of the year again, so we’re tipping off our fifth annual March Modness! The event is a celebration of modding, and the modding community that we’ve built and maintained over the past 25 years. Naturally we support modding all year round, but we’ve nominated March as a time to get extra creative and productive!

As always, March Modness includes a giveaway. All you need to do is upload a new mod to the Downloads section with “March Modness” in the description, and you’ll go into the draw to win a copy of NBA 2K23 PC. The mod can be for any basketball game that can be modded, including retro titles. Full terms and conditions can be found below. Congratulations once again to Pep, the winner of last year’s giveaway!

Additionally, I’m taking this opportunity to announce a change to the way I post bulletins about recent uploads. For years now, I’ve been using the term “File Additions” for those bulletins, as it’s what our founders used when they first began maintaining a Downloads database back in the mid 90s. It’s something I’ve kept out of tradition, but in order to move with the times and remove any ambiguity, those posts are now going to be titled “Mod Releases”.

I’m looking forward to this being an exciting and productive March Modness. As always, I’ll be looking to get in on the fun myself with a few releases. The modding bug does bite from time to time, and this is obviously the month to indulge it. Stay tuned for those releases, and all of the great work that I’m sure is coming this month!

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #416 of the NLSC Podcast!

In an exciting development, NBA Live 2001 enthusiasts Nate and Roger are on Parsec, which means a 2v2 showdown is in our future! Speaking of Parsec, our recent sessions have given us a new appreciation for a couple of often-criticised games in the NBA Live series. Our NBA Jam: On Fire Edition Tournament also wrapped up, and it ended in spectacular fashion. Dipping into our collection as we often do leaves us wondering: which three games would we take with us to an island we’d be stuck on indefinitely? We share our answers, and open up the mailbag to see which games the community would pick. With February drawing to a close, we also look ahead to March Modness.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:32:26 — 63.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

This is a very late announcement, but congratulations to Pep, winner of our March Modness 2021 giveaway! Pep continues to make great updates for NBA 2K14 to this day, and also won the giveaway back in 2019. Pep has won a copy of the Standard Edition of NBA 2K22 PC, and will also receive an NLSC t-shirt, courtesy of Arcane Team Apparel.

A big thanks as always to everyone who entered this year’s March Modness contest, and continues to share their mods with our community! Don’t forget that we offer free and permanent file hosting for our modding community, in order to preserve these great releases for years to come. With NBA 2K22 released and a new season of modding underway, I encourage everyone to make use of our facilities. For more information on uploading and adding files to our Downloads database, be sure to check out this tutorial.

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with some blunt truths about paid mods, and modders that insist that they deserve payment for their work.

Way back in September 2016, I wrote an article explaining why we don’t allow paid mods in our community. I intended it to be an article that I’d link to whenever the subject came up, and over the years, it’s proven to be handy to have at the ready. The short version is that from a legal standpoint, charging for mods could land us in a lot of hot water, and we’d rather avoid that. It’s also never been the done thing in our community, and we’ve been committed to that stance for almost 25 years now. The fact of the matter is that it could cause a lot of headaches, and we don’t want that.

There’s another reason that we’re against the practice of paid mods, however; one that hasn’t really been discussed. The simple fact of the matter is that you don’t deserve to get paid for your mods. I don’t deserve to get paid for the mods I’ve made over the years, either. No one deserves to get paid for creating mods for a basketball video game, or any game for that matter. The key word here is “deserve”, which implies that one is entitled to be paid, and that simply isn’t the case. Please don’t get me wrong here. I don’t say this to diminish the efforts of modders in our community and beyond. It’s important to understand and accept this blunt truth though, so let me explain.

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Episode #366 of the NLSC Podcast is out now! Derek (aka Dee4Three) and I are your hosts for this weekly podcast that’s all about basketball gaming.

A recent modding disaster inspires us to reflect on some of our past follies, and the need to adopt good modding practices. In particular, we note the appeal of a fresh start, and how it distracts us from what’s already on the workbench. Our main discussion topic this week is something we’ve been thinking about for a while: the stigma against older basketball gamers, and adult gamers in general. We discuss the issue of age-appropriate hobbies, the benefits of gaming regardless of age, and how long we see ourselves hitting the virtual hardwood. In this week’s mailbag, we’re talking about putting the fun back into the sim titles, and an interesting scenario regarding the three-point line.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:32:40 — 63.7MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Join in the conversation in the comments below, or here in the Forum! Additionally, feel free to hit us up with any feedback on the episode, as well as mailbag questions and topic suggestions for future shows. For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. The show also comes out on our YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe for future episodes and other video content.

My first releases for this year’s March Modness are a little different. As I mentioned in Episode #363 of the NLSC Podcast, revisiting the Xbox 360 version of NBA Live 06 to check a couple of details resulted in an extended session with the game, and the inclination to mess around with its rosters.

To that end, I’ve whipped up a couple of quick projects, both of which I’m sharing today. The first is an End of Season roster, which includes final 2006 season lineups. I’ve also added a few missing players that ended up having prominent roles, such as Smush Parker. It’s not as detailed of an update as I’d make for PC, but it’s something I put together for my own use, and have decided to share it.

The second roster adds makeshift 1998 Bulls and 1998 Lakers to the game. Again, it’s nowhere near as comprehensive as a roster I’d make for PC, but you get the idea. It’s something else I made just for fun, and am sharing in case anyone else wants to try it out. Download the End of Season rosters here, and the ’98 teams rosters here. I’ve also created a post for them in my NBA Live 06 release topic.

Please note that rosters for the Xbox 360 version of NBA Live 06 need to be rehashed and resigned before they’ll work on another console. I’ve found a video which explains the process, which I’ve posted below along with some basic installation instructions. Other than that, I’m providing these saves as-is, with no guarantees. I hope a few people will feel inclined to try them out! I’m also still working on some projects for PC games, so stay tuned.

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It’s March 1st, so that means we’re tipping off the fourth annual March Modness here at the NLSC! For those who are unaware, the event is intended to be a celebration of modding. We of course welcome mod releases all year round, but we invite modders to get extra creative and productive during this month!

In addition to our usual File Additions bulletins and spotlighting other big releases, we’ll be holding the usual giveaway. As a thank you to our talented modding community, anyone who releases work and adds it to our Downloads section will go in the draw to win a copy of the Standard Edition of NBA 2K22 PC. Congratulations once again to DaCrispy, who won the giveaway last year.

To enter the giveaway, all you need to do is release a mod and upload it to our Downloads section during the month of March 2021, with “March Modness” in the description. The mod may be for any PC version of NBA Live or NBA 2K, but it must be your own work and remain hosted in our Downloads section. Please see below for the full terms and conditions of entry, and good luck!

Once again, I’ll be looking to get into the spirit of the event myself with at least a few releases, hopefully including my long overdue rosters for NBA 2K11. As usual, I also have a few other ideas I’d like to explore, time permitting. Stay tuned for that, and the many fantastic releases I’m sure that we’ll see throughout our fourth annual March Modness!

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