bardown 0.3.7

Faces stay faces.

• No more nets, gloves or jerseys on players' faces. The game builds player textures (skins, gear) on the GPU and has the CPU pack them. Some of those builds were left on the GPU instead of going to memory, so the CPU packed whatever was there before, and a random player ended up with a net or a glove for a face. Every player-sized build now goes to memory, as on the Xbox. A texture the game writes while it's being read is also caught now and read again.

Downloads

System	File
Linux (glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Mint 21, Fedora, Arch and later)	bardown-0.3.7-x86_64.AppImage
Windows 10/11, 64-bit	bardown-0.3.7-windows-x64.zip

You need your own NHL 14 Xbox 360 disc image (base disc, no title update). Nothing from the game is included.

Updating from 0.3.x

Replace the AppImage, or unzip over the old Windows folder. Settings, saves and the extracted game stay where they are.

Quick start

1. Put bardown in a folder of its own (the AppImage, the unzipped folder).
2. Put your NHL 14 .iso in the same folder.
3. Run it: double-click the AppImage (make it executable first), bardown.exe on Windows (SmartScreen: More info, then Run anyway).
4. The first start takes a few minutes, once: it extracts the disc and translates the shaders. After that it starts straight away.

Controller or keyboard both work; F1 opens the settings. Full instructions, controls and troubleshooting are in the README.

Android test build 1 (work in progress)

Work in progress: an Android test build. It needs testing on a real device and may not work yet.

This is the first Android build of bardown (ARM64, Android 10+, Vulkan). It has only been run in the Android emulator so far, where it starts, loads the game and draws its first frames. Nothing is known yet about speed or the picture on a real phone or handheld.

What it can't do yet:

• translate the game's shaders on the device (the tool for that has no Android version), so a PC is needed once to make them
• pick the game from a file picker: the files are copied into the app's folder by hand
• touch controls: a controller (or a handheld's built-in one) is needed

Setting it up

1. On a PC (Linux or Windows), run bardown 0.3.6 or later once with your NHL 14 disc image, until the title screen. That extracts the game into a game folder and makes shaders.bin, both beside bardown.
2. Install bardown-android-test-1-android-arm64.apk on the device (allow installing from unknown sources). Open it once and close it: that creates its folder.
3. Copy the game folder and shaders.bin from the PC into Android/data/org.enoki.bardown/files/ on the device (USB, or any file manager that can reach Android/data).
4. Open bardown again.

What to send back

The newest file in Android/data/org.enoki.bardown/files/logs/, plus a few words on what you saw: how far it got, how it looked, how smooth it was. That log says most of what's needed to fix things.

You need your own NHL 14 Xbox 360 disc image (base disc, no title update). Nothing from the game is included.

bardown 0.3.6

A fix for wrong faces after a jersey change.

• Faces right after a jersey change. The game builds team gear on the GPU and has the CPU pack it into textures. When it built into the same spot a second time, the copy back to memory was skipped, so a player could end up with a jersey or glove pattern on his face. Every build the CPU reads is copied now, and only the area the game asked for, as on the Xbox.

Everything from 0.3.4 and 0.3.5 is in here too: clean sound, the jersey-screen freeze fix, and the face, jersey and banner fixes.

Downloads

System	File
Linux (glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Mint 21, Fedora, Arch and later)	bardown-0.3.6-x86_64.AppImage
Windows 10/11, 64-bit	bardown-0.3.6-windows-x64.zip

You need your own NHL 14 Xbox 360 disc image (base disc, no title update). Nothing from the game is included.

Updating from 0.3.x

Replace the AppImage, or unzip over the old Windows folder. Settings, saves and the extracted game stay where they are. Coming from 0.3.3 or older, the shaders are translated again on the first start (about a minute).

Quick start

1. Put bardown in a folder of its own (the AppImage, or the unzipped folder).
2. Put your NHL 14 .iso in the same folder.
3. Run it: double-click the AppImage (make it executable first), or bardown.exe on Windows (SmartScreen: More info, then Run anyway).
4. The first start takes a few minutes, once: it extracts the disc and translates the shaders. After that it starts straight away.

Controller or keyboard both work; F1 opens the settings. Full instructions, controls and troubleshooting are in the README.

bardown 0.3.5

A fix for a freeze on the jersey screen.

• No freeze when changing jerseys. 0.3.4 could throw away the jersey preview image partway through a frame while that frame still had a copy into it waiting to run; the graphics driver crashed on it and the game hung on the jersey screen. Images are now kept until no frame can still use them.

Everything from 0.3.4 is in here too: sounds start clean and play to the end, and the face, jersey and banner fixes.

Downloads

System	File
Linux (glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Mint 21, Fedora, Arch and later)	bardown-0.3.5-x86_64.AppImage
Windows 10/11, 64-bit	bardown-0.3.5-windows-x64.zip

You need your own NHL 14 Xbox 360 disc image (base disc, no title update). Nothing from the game is included.

Updating from 0.3.x

Replace the AppImage, or unzip over the old Windows folder. Settings, saves and the extracted game stay where they are. Coming from 0.3.3 or older, the shaders are translated again on the first start (about a minute).

Quick start

1. Put bardown in a folder of its own (the AppImage, or the unzipped folder).
2. Put your NHL 14 .iso in the same folder.
3. Run it: double-click the AppImage (make it executable first), or bardown.exe on Windows (SmartScreen: More info, then Run anyway).
4. The first start takes a few minutes, once: it extracts the disc and translates the shaders. After that it starts straight away.

Controller or keyboard both work; F1 opens the settings. Full instructions, controls and troubleshooting are in the README.

bardown 0.3.4

Sound and picture fixes.

• Sounds start clean. Every sound in the game started with 35 ms of whatever its buffer played last, and the real sound came in 35 ms late. It showed most on the pause menu (a random swoosh, loud or silent, on every move) and as a short buzz now and then in play. The decoder was answering the game's "is there sound yet?" check too early; it now does what the Xbox does.
• Sounds play to the end. The last few milliseconds of each sound were never handed over, and the game waited for them. They are now.
• Faces, jerseys and banners. Textures the game rewrote in place, and images drawn on the GPU into memory the game later reused, could stay stale: black faces, a jersey drawn on a player's face, flashing replay banners, stretched portraits. Both are now dropped when their memory changes.
• Alpha test uses the game's own comparison instead of always "at least", which fixes cut-outs drawn inside out.
• F8 saves the last 10 seconds of sound to the logs folder, for reporting what you heard.

Downloads

System	File
Linux (glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Mint 21, Fedora, Arch and later)	bardown-0.3.4-x86_64.AppImage
Windows 10/11, 64-bit	bardown-0.3.4-windows-x64.zip

You need your own NHL 14 Xbox 360 disc image (base disc, no title update). Nothing from the game is included.

Updating from 0.3.x

Replace the AppImage, or unzip over the old Windows folder. Settings, saves and the extracted game stay where they are. The shaders are translated again on the first start (about a minute), since the alpha test fix changes them.

Quick start

1. Put bardown in a folder of its own (the AppImage, or the unzipped folder).
2. Put your NHL 14 .iso in the same folder.
3. Run it: double-click the AppImage (make it executable first), or bardown.exe on Windows (SmartScreen: More info, then Run anyway).
4. The first start takes a few minutes, once: it extracts the disc and translates the shaders. After that it starts straight away.

Controller or keyboard both work; F1 opens the settings. Full instructions, controls and troubleshooting are in the README.

build input (private)

Encrypted build input for CI. Not a release.

bardown 0.3.3

A small timing fix, and better logs.

• Timers keep time. The game runs a timer 1,000 times a second, and it fired about half a millisecond late on average, often more than a millisecond. It now fires within about 55 microseconds, and uses a little less CPU doing it.
• Better logs. The log says what any long frame (over 40 ms) spent its time on, how often the speakers asked for sound and none was ready, and how late the timers fire, every 10 seconds. If something feels off, the newest file in logs shows it.

Downloads

System	File
Linux (glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Mint 21, Fedora, Arch and later)	bardown-0.3.3-x86_64.AppImage
Windows 10/11, 64-bit	bardown-0.3.3-windows-x64.zip

You need your own NHL 14 Xbox 360 disc image (base disc, no title update). Nothing from the game is included.

Updating from 0.3.x

Replace the AppImage, or unzip over the old Windows folder. Settings, saves, the extracted game and the translated shaders stay where they are, so it starts straight away.

Quick start

1. Put bardown in a folder of its own (the AppImage, or the unzipped folder).
2. Put your NHL 14 .iso in the same folder.
3. Run it: double-click the AppImage (make it executable first), or bardown.exe on Windows (SmartScreen: More info, then Run anyway).
4. The first start takes a few minutes, once: it extracts the disc and translates the shaders. After that it starts straight away.

Controller or keyboard both work; F1 opens the settings. Full instructions, controls and troubleshooting are in the README.

bardown 0.3.2

Smoother and much lighter on the GPU.

• Vsync is on. The window used to be redrawn thousands of times a second while the game made 60, holding the GPU at full clock (about 200 W on an RTX 3090 at 4K, with coil whine). Frames now go out in step with your display, and the same game draws about 10 W over an idle desktop.
• Even motion. About once a second a frame was shown twice and the next one skipped, a small stall and jump in play. Each frame of the game is now shown once, as it's made: 60 a second in play, 30 in menus and cutscenes, as on the Xbox.
• Frame limit in the settings (F1, Display): off, 30, 60, 120, 144 or 240.

Downloads

System	File
Linux (glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Mint 21, Fedora, Arch and later)	bardown-0.3.2-x86_64.AppImage
Windows 10/11, 64-bit	bardown-0.3.2-windows-x64.zip

You need your own NHL 14 Xbox 360 disc image (base disc, no title update). Nothing from the game is included.

Updating from 0.3.x

Replace the AppImage, or unzip over the old Windows folder. Settings, saves, the extracted game and the translated shaders stay where they are, so it starts straight away.

Quick start

1. Put bardown in a folder of its own (the AppImage, or the unzipped folder).
2. Put your NHL 14 .iso in the same folder.
3. Run it: double-click the AppImage (make it executable first), or bardown.exe on Windows (SmartScreen: More info, then Run anyway).
4. The first start takes a few minutes, once: it extracts the disc and translates the shaders. After that it starts straight away.

Controller or keyboard both work; F1 opens the settings. Full instructions, controls and troubleshooting are in the README.

bardown 0.3.1

A fix release: goal nets are see-through again. The game draws its nets with the Xbox's alpha-to-mask, which the native renderer didn't support, so every net came out as a solid white sheet. The ice, the crease and the posts now show through the mesh.

Downloads

System	File
Linux (glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Mint 21, Fedora, Arch and later)	bardown-0.3.1-x86_64.AppImage
Windows 10/11, 64-bit	bardown-0.3.1-windows-x64.zip

You need your own NHL 14 Xbox 360 disc image (base disc, no title update). Nothing from the game is included.

Updating from 0.3.0

Replace the AppImage, or unzip over the old Windows folder. Settings, saves, the extracted game and the translated shaders stay where they are, so it starts straight away.

Quick start

1. Put bardown in a folder of its own (the AppImage, or the unzipped folder).
2. Put your NHL 14 .iso in the same folder.
3. Run it: double-click the AppImage (make it executable first), or bardown.exe on Windows (SmartScreen: More info, then Run anyway).
4. The first start takes a few minutes, once: it extracts the disc and translates the shaders. After that it starts straight away.

Controller or keyboard both work; F1 opens the settings. Full instructions, controls and troubleshooting are in the README.

bardown 0.3.0

NHL 14 for the Xbox 360, recompiled to run natively. Now on Windows as well as Linux.

Downloads

System	File
Linux (glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Mint 21, Fedora, Arch and later)	bardown-0.3.0-x86_64.AppImage
Windows 10/11, 64-bit	bardown-0.3.0-windows-x64.zip

You need your own NHL 14 Xbox 360 disc image (base disc, no title update). Nothing from the game is included.

Quick start

1. Put bardown in a folder of its own (the AppImage, or the unzipped folder).
2. Put your NHL 14 .iso in the same folder.
3. Run it: double-click the AppImage (make it executable first), or bardown.exe on Windows (SmartScreen: More info, then Run anyway).
4. The first start takes a few minutes, once: it extracts the disc and translates the shaders. After that it starts straight away.

Controller or keyboard both work; F1 opens the settings. Full instructions, controls and troubleshooting are in the README.

What's new

• Windows build, checked on a real Windows 11 PC.
• One Linux AppImage for older distros too (glibc 2.35 and newer).
• No GPU emulation: the native renderer draws everything, through a small graphics plugin of its own.
• Runs on older CPUs (SSE4.2, Intel 2009+ / AMD 2011+), and on GPUs without 24-bit depth (AMD, Apple).
• A clear message instead of a black screen when the GPU lacks something.
• The folder can be moved anywhere; it finds its game again.

Full list in CHANGELOG.md.