Questions, ideas and blood on the asphalt

Hi!

First of all; sorry if i make this in the wrong place.

Since i was kid i've been a Street Fighter fan, specially in the nintendo's 16 bits console,
my first game and my first game console of all time. For long 6/7 years i've been collecting physical ports SF games
for a lot of VG systems, but this week i could say i finally had all the SNES versions, from the 4 official games, to the 2
bootlegs of SFEX and the xmen crossover, to a SSFII bootleg to the SFIICE hack. But also for years my curiosity has been
increasing about the SFII hacks. Not about what they're, but what they could be, or what i can do with those hacks.

There are a lot of move hacks or title hacks or palette hacks with ridiculous changes like Honda's One Hundred Slap
releasing a Hadouken, or matches starting in the air, or screens completely full of fireballs. But while i look to those
hacks, one in particular left me a more concrete idea in mind. That was the Street Fighter II(I) hack, Which makes me think
if somehow is possible to have a SFII hack actually related to the SFIII games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTj6gqEoPRI
(the hack)

By the moment this is just an idea. I know less-than-nothing about romhacking so i'll take all the time i would need to
read, reread and understand all the documents avaliable (starting from the docs in romhacking.net) about binary code, hexadecimal system and so on, so this thread is just for questions about what is actually possible to reproduce in a SFII rom and what isn't.

The ideas of moveset changes are few for the moment, reduced first to 4 characters to look where this can or can't going on.

Some of them are;

Ryu
- LP hadouken works like regular hadouken
- MP hadouken works like shakunetsu hadouken
- SP hadouken works like denjin hadouken
- Mid-air Tatsumaki Senpuu Kiaku avaliable

Ken
- HP shoryuken gain burn effect on opponent
- Mid-air Tatsumaki Senpuu Kiaku avaliable

Chun Li
- adding kikouken (a-la SFIIT, a blue yoga fireball)
- LP kikouken could be quick but short range
- MP kikouken could be regular in speed and range
- HP kikouken could be slow but with long range

dhalsim (necro edit)
- changing yoga flame to have electric effect on opponent
- maybe the DHP can have an electric effect on opponent
- modify colours to a more Necro-like palette
(what can be doing with yoga fireball?)

other few ideas
- parrying--it is possible?
- SFIII NG/2ndI:GA/3rdS:FFtF quotes
- turn guile more alex-like

So, if someone has done a SFII SNES hack and want to answer these questions, please let me know.
And also; THIS IS NOT A REQUEST. I'm not asking "if you could do this or that for me", i'm just asking if someone with
SFIIWW SNES rom's knowledge does have an idea of what of the previous points are actually possible to reproduce or not.

That's all. Sorry if i made a mistake or if someone somehow feels insulted with this post, and thanks for read to this point. Greetings!

Sidenote; Someone knows if Lion's Slideshow ver2.2 for SNES still exist in the net? I've asking in a lot of places but nobody knows o remember it.

I'm no expert, but...

Yes it all sounds possible to me. How difficult to accomplish though could range from almost trivial for some (tweaking character sprites, basically anything that's strictly a graphical change should be pretty easy) to nightmarishly hard (having to redesign the game engine because it was only built to handle so many moves, certain types of effects). I have very little experience hacking existing ROMs, but based on what I know I can't see any reason why everything you list shouldn't be totally possible on the SNES.

The hard part is managing to cram it into the existing ROM without screwing anything up. Taking as an example - splitting the hadouken into three different kinds of attacks based on button pressed. Speaking strictly from a code point of view that's easy - just read joypad input and branch appropriately to the right attack. But now you have to make room to insert that bit of code, so you have to relocate some other piece of code. If the moved code contained branch instructions, you have to patch those branches to go to the right places again (relative addressing). And if you move it to another bank, then whatever references that code has to be adjusted to make sure it goes to the correct bank... Which in a large scale project where you want to change or add a lot of things, I think that means you're looking less at "hacking" the ROM and more at totally deconstructing it and rebuilding it.

Like I said. I've only done the most crude of ROMhacks before, so I can't give advice on the best way to go about it. But I think a prerequisite for something of the scale you're talking about would be to disassemble the entire thing (as best you can, 65816 disassemblers are not perfect so I don't know) and just try to read, understand and identify as much of the code as you can, until you know where all the key parts are happening and the general flow of the program. Which is a lot of work.

And of course... I have no idea how close to a 4MB ROM SFII is, but if it was very close to the limit then you may just plain need more space to fit these things in. Which means you have to either get into compression, or a more obnoxious ROM format like Ex-(HiROM or LoROM), or some kind of hardware enhancement like MSU1.

I apologize if my reply isn't terribly helpful to you. It's just difficult to answer such questions without first knowing the SFII program inside and out.

Wouldn't it be easier to just make your own fighting game engine and add the Street Fighter characters? You could actually disassemble some things to see how much damage each move does and stuff and make some observations and carry it to your code.

Street Fighter II is 16 Mbit, Street Fighter II Turbo is 20 Mbit, and Super Street Fighter II is 32 Mbit. You could expand either of the first two to 24 Mbit without much problem.

First of all


Don't apologize. Every opinion and info is very welcome (while it doesn't have any strong word XD) so i can considere points of view i know i can't see at my own or escape from my view.



I suppouse that could be easier but i'm lesser-than-a-newbie in this so my first command is watch/read and learn. So develope an engine is out of my actual capabilities. But maybe if this works, it could be a more solid idea for me. Thanks for your opinion.



That is a good point. I choose WW becuase it looks like the prime "victim" for modders and "multicart makers" for his smaller size. In my ignorance i think that's more manageable, so i could try.

Also, i'll compile all the answers in this thread so i can reread while this "experiment" is active, to begin conscious of the many aspects technicals or from personal experiences around a hack or a bootlef develop. Again, thanks for read and comment, and feel free to participate with your opinion.