Jimmy Connors Real Pro Tennis Tour

The licence covered Jimmy Connors and nobody else, so the fifteen players around him are invented: MUELLER, WURZL, BAECKER, KRAUSE, PAPOU, WIJNFORT.

The disguise was applied very thinly. The developers did not invent players - they renamed real ones and left everything else in place. Each slot keeps the real player's nationality, a portrait drawn from photographs of the actual player, and a rating and playing style matching their real standing. The result is a roster that identifies itself: a German serve-and-volley player rated near the top of the field with a portrait of a red-haired man is not a mystery.

This hack puts the real names back, corrects the flags that were wrong, and replaces all sixteen portraits with new ones built from photographs of the real players.

Each slot 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.

Slot 16 is the one exception. TANAKA is not a disguised player at all - its portrait is an older bald man in glasses, which is nobody on the pro tour. It is a developer cameo. With no real player to restore, that slot became Michael Chang and its flag was corrected from Japan to USA.

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

PORTRAITS

All sixteen portraits are new and every one is built from a photograph of the real player, reduced to the game's own 32x32 cell and its own eleven-colour tan ramp. Not one portrait is the developers' original art any more.

Each was tuned individually, because one tone curve cannot serve sixteen photographs: exposure, contrast and hair colour all decide where a face has to land in nine steps of tan, and a single setting turns the fair-haired players to mud and the dark-haired ones to silhouettes. Two rules are shared across all of them - every head is scaled by the width of its FACE rather than its hair, so all sixteen come out the same size on screen, and each is anchored on the chin, so no chin is ever clipped; hair gives way at the top of the frame instead.

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 nationality flag, as above.

NOT CHANGED

• The five coaches keep their names. Nick Bollettieri aside they are not disguised real people, and inventing identities for them would be doing exactly what this hack sets out to undo.
• 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.

Credit

This exists because of the French patch Vrais Noms v1.0 (https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/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.

More infos: https://pest218.github.io/jcrptt/