#madden 2003

[nintendometro]

The trailer for 'Madden 2003', from a Gamecube Preview DVD.

[oldgamemags]

Are You On The Bus? 'Madden 2003' PlayStation 2

[oldinterneticons]

[vgprintads]

‘Madden 2003 - “You Gotta Love This Job”‘

[PC / GCN / GBA / XBOX / PS2] [USA] [MAGAZINE, MULTI-PAGE] [2002]

GamePro, October 2002 (#169)

via personal collection

[oldgamemags]

An 8 page magazine advert for ‘Madden 2003′ on the PS2, Gamecube and Xbox.

[skyboxeye]

Playing Madden 2003 on Windows

Windows XP

Installing and running the patched game on Windows XP, in my case a virtual machine, works. This is despite the system requirements tool flagging my multicore processor as problematic:

Windows 10

There are a couple of issues here, only some of which we (at the time of writing) have solutions for: 1.) SafeDisc DRM and 2.) some kind of operating system-level incompatibility. To work around SafeDisc we can use SafeDiscShim or obtain a no-CD ("cracked") version of mainapp.exe. I'm aware of unSafedisc but haven't tried it myself. With one of these in place, you should be able to launch Madden - but you'll you hear a single menu SFX and perhaps a half-second of music over a black screen, and then the game crashes.

Interestingly the retail game produces an error log, a file called mainapp.StackDump.dat, upon crashes. It will look something like:

Exception code: (-1073741819) 0xC0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION ... Fault module: F:\EA SPORTS\MADDEN 2003\mainapp.exe

This doesn't give us much insight; it just means the program accessed some memory it wasn't "supposed" to, as enforced by the OS. We encounter this even when running as admin and/or installing Madden to the same drive as the OS. Running the game in a single-threaded (see above re: system requirements panel) fashion doesn't help, either:

start /affinity 1 mainapp.exe

Appendix 1: Madden 2003 help threads

One and two and three.

[skyboxeye]

Playing Madden 2002 on Windows 10

Patching the game

The latest version of 2002 is apparently v.2.3.1. This includes changes to league.DAT and the main EXE files.

I couldn't find an official/vanilla patch download for 2002. My go-to, Patches Scrolls, doesn't have it. Ultimately though you won't be able to run vanilla Madden 2002 EXEs on Windows 10.

We can stack modified ("no-cd") patches for 2.21 (MyAbandonware or Archive) and 2.3.1 (elsewhere) to get a fully updated, Windows 10 ready installation. If you're uncomfortable with this, see the alternative solution described in Appendix 0.

Running the game

Neither game will start unmodified on Windows 10. The problem is that Madden's DRM isn't compatible with Windows 10. It seems that other classic versions e.g. 2004 crash here as well.

This thread from 2015 complains about framerate on Windows 7, and indeed we'll see the same issue on Windows 10. The solution to use a DirectX 8 -> 9 converter such as DgVoodoo. This will also fix various font rendering issues.

Appendix 0: Other solutions for SafeDisc DRM

To work around SafeDisc we can use SafeDiscShim or obtain a no-CD ("cracked") version of mainapp.exe. I'm aware of unSafedisc but haven't tried it myself.

Appendix 1: useful Football Idiot threads

First, there is a backup site - sounds like some drama unfolded.

The site has a plethora of mods - see the "files" megathread. Also this megathread for "useful links".

There is an area of the forums devoted to classic Madden games.

For 2002, tried getting patch from this FTP. I couldn't get it working using FileZilla though. I think this means the FTP is indexed by that site but is since no longer hosted.

[kurhl]

Rivalidade em Madden 2003.