"Street Fighter II" for the NES theoretically possible?

Would it have been possible to program a decent version of "Street Fighter II" (without "Turbo") for the NES?

Let's assume we use smaller sprites, like standard 16 x 32 ones instead of the huge sprites that are seen in the arcade and Super Nintendo version. And let's ignore all the visual tricks like the floor that changes the perspective and the moving background objects. Let's just use static backgrounds.

And if we imageine that the original "Street Fighter II" is played with just one punch and one kick button, how faithfully could the gameplay be recreated? Would it be possible to create a game that, from a pure gameplay point of view, basically plays like the arcade and Super Nintendo version?

What would you say?

It could be done, but you'd have to take shortcuts with hitbox accuracy, collision detection, etc. Using two buttons, and having the speed of the button presses determine the button strength could work, like in Capcom vs SNK for Neo Geo Pocket Color.

"Just like the arcade" I would not expect, but it could definitely be better than the existing pirates.

Aside from framerate issues, the Street Fighter 2 for Game Boy (regular, plain 4MHz 4-color Game Boy) is surprisingly accurate with gameplay.

Joy Mech Fight?

It's been attempted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hQjFpGB6_k

How about a real attempt, not a low quality bootleg version?

Any "real attempt" would need Capcom's OK. Otherwise, it's still a bootleg.

The concept of an NES fighting game comes up from time to time on NESdev BBS and in EFnet #nesdev. I ended up figuring out that a version with a scale of 4 cm = 1 pixel, or roughly 48 pixel tall characters, would probably be realistic for the NES without too much flicker. The hardest part of making an NES fighting game would be to find people willing to draw hundreds of frames of animation, roughly 120-160 for each original character, but then that might not be hard if we can enlist MUGEN fans in this effort.

No. No, no, no, no. Just no. This game is horrible. It plays nothing like the real "Street Fighter II". "Street Fighter Alpha" for the Game Boy Color is a decent port. And "Mortal Kombat II" for the Game Boy plays surprisingly well and accurate. But "Street Fighter II" for the Game Boy is an abomination. The characters jump much too high, the reactions are laggy. And overall, the physics are not like in the actual game. I play "Street Fighter" games in the same way, no matter if I play the Super Nintendo version or an emulation of the arcade or the Game Boy Color version of "Street Fighter Alpha". But with "Street Fighter II", I just cannot play like that. Because the gameplay is totally screwed. Even the pirate card "Street Fighter III" for the NES plays better than that piece of crap.


I actually really meant "Street Fighter II", not just any fighting game. Otherwise, there's already the "Turtles" game. But I'd specifically be interested in how a decent conversion of "Street Fighter II" would look.


Yeah, but there's still a difference if you are some obscure Asian company trying to make quick money. Or if you're an actual fan who honestly tries to make a decent port.


If people would not do an original game, but indeed a port, you could automatically rescale the original sprites from the arcade.

Another option: Instead of trying to replicate the arcade game, you could do the "Street Fighter II" equivalent of the NES conversion of "Final Fight": "Mighty Street Fighter II". Someone even created screenshot already:
www.listentome.net/omgrngs6.gif
www.listentome.net/omgrngs7.gif

It's still something that could wind up screwed by the lawyers. Capcom sued Data East over the latter's remake of Street Fighter II with original characters. Capcom lost, establishing precedent that character appearances are what make a fighting game original.

That's actually one of the poorer attempts - this one (which is not by Yoko - it's a titlescreen hack of this one) is a bit better.

I'm pretty sure a good version is possible. And if you wanted you could even have all 6 attack buttons as plugging in a SNES controller is easy. Or you could do that goofy 3 Attack Buttons and the last button switches Kicks and Punches.

The video Quietust posted looks like they did a pretty good job graphically atleast.

Or have it contextually determine whether a punch or kick is appropriate based on the directions + A and the character's fighting style. One popular two-button fighter has this system:

On ground

• A: Jab
• Forward+wait+A: Strong
• Down+wait+A: Low
• Forward+A: Fierce
• Down+A: Sweep
• Up+A: High

In air

• A: Spin
• Up+A, Down+A, Left+A, Right+A: Strong attack in that direction

This frees up B and directions+B for the special moves.

This is pedantic. His point is that a cheap quickly-produced knockoff by people who presumably are not versed in the technical workings of a good fighting game engine is not going to be nearly as good as a conscious non-financially-driven effort to make a quality version of the same. Whether or not it is using Capcom's IP is not the point here.

Yeah, because Data East is a company that sold their game. But I doubt that Capcom would give a damn about some NES ROM that can be downloaded for free. This is one of the positive things about Capcom: They usually don't try to shut down fan projects. Just take a look at this:
http://sf2nes.smeenet.org
This one pretty much proves that Capcom doesn't care. I doubt they would do anything to stop the creation of some fan-made ROM that tries to recreate "Street Fighter II", a game from 1991, and that is supposed to run on a hardware that isn't produced anymore for more than 15 years.
Besides, when they saw the "Street Fighter X Mega Man" game, they even officially licensed it. So, who knows. If some capable programmers were actually able to create a worthy port of "Street Fighter II" on the NES, maybe in the near future you could order it as a cartridge with Capcom's official logo on it or download it as a ROM from their website.

About the different attacks: I think for a start, it should be enough to be able to use one kind of punch and kick button. If the game is good, two versions could be included: Tap button for weak attack, hold button for strong attack. Using the directions is not good since this could interfere with many of the special attacks, especially the charge attacks. And switching between punch and kick: Well, this isn't Sega, so I would be against it. Same with the program deciding it based on context. After all, this shall recreate the original gaming experience as good as possible. So, stripping the medium punch and kick would at least preserve the general input routines. Fiddling with the d-pad wouldn't be faithful "Street Fighter" controlling anymore.

You could also use a controller with the turbo buttons for other attacks...

I disagree. Older fighting games (like Street Fighter II) are not computationally intensive at all, seeing as there are few active objects and hardly any object management (objects aren't created/destroyed that frequently or in large quantities). They also lack any significant level management, since arenas are hardly wider than 2 screens and have very few interactions with the players.


Graphically, this one is pretty decent. Character portraits could be better, but in-game sprites are pretty colorful and are moderately large. As is usual with pirates though, physics and controls leave something to be desired.

This is a good point - using two pages of tiles I don't think any actual work would have to be done for scrolling in regards to loading tiles, changing attributes, etc.

I agree. I don't think SF2 would have any trouble on the NES. For instance, unlike SNES, you have nearly instant bankswitching to load new fighter graphics for any frame of animation. And I do think typically the level/arenas are only 2 screen widths wide so you don't even have to update nametables during scrolling. You'd have all the time you could need to run a GOOD fighting game engine. An experienced developer/team could probably make a version of SF2 on NES that is actually fun to play. And as I said, there are numerous ways you could have all 6 attacks.

Sooo. Anybody interested to actually do that game? I would volunteer to rip all the necessary graphics from the arcade version. And to resize them if you can provide me a fitting algorithm.

Maybe use rotsprite to do the resizing. edit: nope, rotsprite doesn't let you change the aspect ratio.

What would rotation have to do with it anyway?

Rotsprite also resizes better than the nearest-neighbor algorithm.

Here's a mockup I did of Ryu (SNES), it's attached here.
Based on http://www.nes-snes-sprites.com/StreetF ... Turbo.html then color-reduced down to 10 colors, obviously needs more work to become proper NES graphics.

Obviously, the mockup could be done much better, for example, getting every sprite on the sheet properly aligned before resizing.

Rotpixels, my Python/PIL based rewrite of rotsprite, does.

Aspect ratio correction is a form of scaling. Rotation, scaling, and shearing are all special cases of affine transformation. Rotsprite and Rotpixels are designed to perform affine transformation on pixel art while avoiding some of the undesirable edge artifacts commonly associated with nearest-neighbor resampling.

I don't see how bankswitching is very useful here, unless you have a lot of banks and they are all extremely optimized for the situations.

For example, for a Ryu vs Chun Li match, if you wanted to change banks to switch to different animations, we'd either have to

1) have Chun Li also do different things whenever Ryu is using an animation from another bank, or
2) have four banks to fit both combinations of animation switches.

Using CHR-RAM, could any of this be simplified?

As for the graphics, I think best results would be obtained with redrawing of graphics, maybe based on scaled versions. Sprites overlapping one another to expand color palette should be minimized in order to keep flickering down. Maybe Ryu could just be dark brown, skin, and white for his body, and then a single red sprite could handle his headband and maybe dark blue hair shine? Those SNES-based sprites look pretty good, but I would be worried for what it would be like with two sets on-screen, especially with two players using different palettes.

Mappers like MMC3 allow to switch 1K/2K parts of the CHR, so it helps a lot for a fighting game - you can select needed frames of two characters with just two register writes. With CHR RAM you would have to upload frames, which will take many TV frames to complete and require double buffering, as you only can upload like 300 bytes per frame. So actually bankswitching is the only real option for a fighting game on the NES, and that is what they actually use (TMNT Tournament Fighters, for example).

Answering to the original question, well, with all these chinese bootleg Street Fighter ports and other fighting games (Fatal Fury, Samurai Spirits, Mortal Kombat, etc), it is clear that it is possible - these ports just needs some polishing that is lacking, especially in the controls and the music. A good fighting SF-like game is also there, the Tournament Fighters. One major problem is that large sprites will have to flicker inevitably, so choosing a smaller size, perhaps without BG scrolling even (not really needed with small sprites), could help to create better impression.

I think Street Fighter III is the original version actually (although it never had any copyright mention at all so I don't get from where the video author got that it's from Yoko).

But yeah, that's pretty much the best attempt so far, as in "it's the only one that's even playable at all". Shame they didn't port the music =| Also that's some rather good job with the backgrounds there (and even moreso with the sprites). Three of the characters are gone, but then again those are the big size characters so I guess that may be the reason. And Claw is still a bitch as usual.

And there must be several revisions because in the cartridge I had only eight backgrounds would be used at all (Dictator's stage uses Chun Li's background). I don't get that problem in emulators. No idea why, probably a different ROM. (also I used to have the great idea to play the game at the hardest difficulty back then... *sigh*)

The combination finely banked CHR-RAM can be pretty powerful. Using 32-128KB of CHR-RAM on a MMC3 give you 32-128 banks of RAM to work with and 4 of them (1KB each) are visible at once for use with sprites. So 2 banks per character, or some other uneven method of sharing with one fixed/shared and 3 for animations. 32-128banks is quite a few banks if they only have to store what needs to be viewed in the current fight, so they don't have to be horrendously optimized. With that much you probably wouldn't even have to draw the characters because of bankswitching.

Double buffering could be made to work. There is enough VRAM in the sprite half of the pattern table to hold a unique image for each of 64 sprites twice over. The biggest problem would be vblank time, and that can be extended with a Battletoads-style top status bar and late enabling of rendering.

There are other non-pirate fighting games on the NES besides Joy Mecha Fight and the Ninja Turtles game. I can think of Datach's Dragon Ball Z and Yuu Yuu Hakusho games, which use fairly small sprites. I believe these games use CHR-RAM rather than bankswitching.

Also, the Dragon Ball Z RPG games have fighting sequences that look a lot like fighting games, even though characters aren't directly controllable. They do make use of the background color as an extra sprite color though, and one of the characters might be drawn with background tiles instead of sprites, preventing flickering by sacrificing background detail.

So far I'd say redoing the graphics in this style would probably suit the NES best. And then you could focus on the other elements that really bring the game together.

In other words, instead of cloning Street Fighter II, clone Pocket Fighter, the fighting game based on the chibi characters introduced in Super Puzzle Fighter II.

Going off of that, taking the sprites from the Wonderswan version would give us more to work with than the ones from the arcade release.

In this case, wouldn't it be possible to just hack the "Mighty Final Fight" ROM? I don't know much about NES programming, but this is how I imagine it:
Remove the ability to walk up and down and map the jump to the up direction of the d-pad.
Change the game so that each fighter has two attack buttons instead of one.
The game already has a hundred-hand-slap-like attack for Guy, so Honda's attack and Chun Li's Lightning Kick could be done with the engine.
Same for attacks where the fighter moves up, like Dragon Punch or Flash Kick.
Blocking is also implemented. (Rolento can do it.)
Throws are also there.
And since you can throw objects, projectiles are there as well.

So, would it be possible to do the "Street Fighter II" equivalent of "Mighty Final Fight" by hacking the "Mighty Final Fight" ROM?

Without looking at Mighty Final Fight right now, it looks like to get it to actually play like Street Fighter 2 at all we're going to have to do a LOT of editing to a fairly unfamiliar engine. My biggest concern would be whether or not MFF implements a three-set hitbox system, with three vulnerable boxes, one body box, and attack boxes that can correlate to each frame of animation.

I guess it would be down to how MFF is implemented and how adaptable it all is. Personally I think MFF's sprites and proportions would be terrible for this, as the hitbox data from SF2 wouldn't make sense on them, even scaled down. At least the sprites in Pocket Fighter or Capcom vs SNK for NGPC are a little more shapely.

Also, since animation would likely have less frames than the arcade game, it's still important that the hitboxes behind them match to the arcade one more or less. For example, a 3-frame hitting animation that gets cut down to 2 frames graphically should still go through 3 "frames" of hitboxes such that the action is not disturbed by this omission.

Of course, in this case the game would not play like its arcade counterpart anymore. But I tought if somebody is going to make a chibi version of the game anyway (i.e. not using scaled-down versions of the real sprites, but using cute cartoon-like sprites), arcade-correctness isn't that important anymore.

So, yeah, when using "Mighty Final Fight" as a basis, you wouldn't need to bother with "Street Fighter II"'s hitbox system anymore or the frames. This game would indeed not play like the arcade game, but it would play like "Mighty Final Fight" without the ability to move up and down, but with the ability to do two attacks (punch and kick) instead of a predetermined one and with the ability to do special moves at will instead of following a combo pattern.

Gameplay-wise, it wouldn't be a conversion of the arcade game. (So, unlike with the Super Nintendo version, you couldn't use it for training and then use the same techniques in the arcade.) But it would nevertheless be a neat little fast-paced game. And the game already provides the functions to include most of the "Street Fighter II" techniques. They would feel different, but they would be there: Punches and kicks are doable. Jump punches and jump kicks also. Blocks and throws are already implemented. You can throw knives, so fireballs shouldn't be a problem either. And the fighters already know moves that look like a Dragon Punch, a Flash Kick or a Hundred Hand Slap. So, I guess every special move from the game could be implemented. OK, Zangief's Spinning Piledriver might be a problem. And Vega's wall jump stuff.

But other than that, what do you say: Apart from drawing the sprites and the backgrounds and from programming the AI, would this be a mundane task for an experienced NES programmer or something really difficult?
Please remember: This one is not about making it arcade-like, but about making it play as a "Street Fighter II" equivalent of the already existing "Mighty Final Fight".

Writing and completing any game is not a "mundane" task. It takes some effort to fully complete a project such as what is suggested.

This. I don't think it is fair to call such a project an analogue to Mighty Final Fight, as a very simple beat 'em up is much simpler than a complex and very technical fighting game. Mighty Final Fight is more of a sequel, anyway; it's a bit of a better game than that turd Final Fight (had to be said!)

I used to create "8-bit Street Fighter" mockups.
After many tests over the years I believe the best source (for in game character graphics) is the Game Boy version.
It's beautiful, official pixel art by Capcom. Perfect for the NES IMHO.
And rips for all character sprites are available at http://www.spriters-resource.com/gameboy/sfii/

While the GameBoy might be a good source, it still remains to be seen how well the NES PPU would do displaying two fighters which use more than 3 colors. If you look at Mega Man, he uses more than 3 colors but it is done with his face being an overlay sprite. And i believe it's just 1 sprite large. Looking at Blanka as you colored him he would need quite a lot. Ken would need some but not as much.

If you lose some color definition or carefully try to color things you could reduce the number of sprites required. Flicker some of the time will be unavoidable. Although here would be a fun thing to try. Imagine doing like arcade games did, and rotate your TV 90 degrees. It would create vertical scanlines that have a limit of 8 per line, but horizontally you'd have no limit per line other than the max sprites. Sure the aspect would be different, but you could have these bigger more defined characters.

My technical knowledge is very limited. I try to be accurate doing my mockups - but I'm never really sure if they are really faithful to NES' limitations.
I suggested fighters made of 2 sprite palettes each because Street Fighter 3 (pirate game from early 1990s) also did this.



And this SF3 runs fine (probably at 60 frames per second). SF3's characters are slightly bigger than SF2 sprites for Game Boy.

Sprite rips of Street Fighter 3 are also available at http://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/streetfighter3/ (it's always nice to study them).
The only problem of using 2 palettes would be coloring extra graphics like "hadoukens".

I also like the idea of turning the monitor. It was mentioned sometime ago as a joke ( viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9590 ) but I'm a big fan of these crazy concepts.

You can usually solve this problem by keeping 2 constant palettes, and leaving one for each character to customize. Since most characters need skin tones, one of the fixed palettes could be composed of 2 skin tones and some other useful color, and the other fixed palette could be used for all effects and attacks (blue, red and white seems good, enough to represent energy blasts and fire).

Or just match fireballs with Ryu's palette, it's not really that big a deal.

It's a nice way to solve it for sure.
It's also interesting to see how some pirate companies solved this problem:

1) Street Fighter 3: Skin colored hadouken


2) Street Blaster Pro: One sprite palette for Ryu, other sprite palette for hadouken


3) Street Fighter Zero 2 97: Flickering (the forbidden word). 1 sprite palette for hadouken and 2 palettes for Ryu.


My personal choice: I would make hadoukens using Ryu's kimono palette. Like this:

That SFZ2 pirate looks like it might do what was suggested and have a shared "flesh tone" palette. The SF3 might do that too. The real question is does someone really want to spend the time to try to reproduce a decent SF2 feeling fighting engine on the NES.

Why go that far? It's much easier just to talk about things that could be done.

That's probably as far as this will go anyway. =)

Definitely not 60FPS =P


Damn, there are many more sprites than I expected o.O Also wait, ending? Serious? I thought this game didn't have any endings? OK, how many versions are of this?

EDIT: you know, wouldn't it be easier to just take that game and hack the title screen and music? (OK, three of the characters would be missing still, but eh)

A shared skin tone palette might run into problems for odd skin colors like Blanka's.

Then just don't care and make his skin the same colour as the other characters anyway, or, just use a single palette for him (like say, using green, brown and dark green).

When porting SF for this platform graphics are understandably taking some severe hits and sacrifices and compromises must be made anyway. The key is how to still make the characters stand out and look good.

And most importantly, actually play smoothly and well like a game worthy of the Street Fighter II name. You know, unlike most pirate fighting games.

The key issue is between lovers NES because of videogames 8bit generation (Master System, PC-Engine, gboy and micros at the time) had an official version of the game. Only Nes and GGear left out. It is high time to have a decent version Nes, Nes being reference in the Community, and of course to show that something was possible at the time and for bureaucratic corporate official was not performed.

Each fighter have his own palette - even when they have the same skin color.
I think it's better this way since Street Fighter have fighters from many different etnies.
I had never seen a "vs. fighting" pirate game with characters using shared palettes.
See Ryu and Chun-Li's:



The only SF3 characters with the same skin color schemes are: Ryu/Ken and Guile/Balrog.
On SF Zero 2 only Ken/Nash and Sodom/Chun-Li have the same skin colors.


Maybe not exactly 60 FPS but a very high number of frames per second - like 48 or 50. However I still believe this game runs at 60 FPS.
As far as I know Street Fighter 3 and Mortal Kombat 3 Extra 60 are the only pirate games (in the "vs. fighting" genre) with excellent, constant framerates for the NES.


Yes. I believe a big hacking project (like people at romhacking.net is doing with the 8-bit Final Fantasy 7) could turn a tweaked SF3 turn into an excellent game. SF3 engine seems to be very good, stable and responsive. Much superior (in terms of performance) to any other Street Fighter 2 released for the NES.

While they don't share a skin tones palette, I think it could work if they did. Sure, Chun Li's legs would look a little redder, but it is not a large loss.

What do you think of an international team formed to create a street fighter 2 for Nes quality?

I think it would be nice - but only if we had permission from Capcom.

I seriously doubt that's gonna happen. The Street Fighter franchise is way too big for Capcom to leave it in the hand of amateurs for a project that won't get them any money.

I doubt as well - even considering that a similar situation has happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter_X_Mega_Man

Oh, so that's why the level design was boring and uninspired.

We can do fan to fan, and we can implement unique and creative ideas, such as having the scenario references to characters and games Nes / Famicom, great cutscenes and revealing. Create the first nes game with 6 buttons. And mostar to the Chinese and to pirateiros Tectoy of Brazil that made Street Fighter 2 master system (cute but ordinary), who will and dedication can make the best fighting game nes ...

That would require plugging original characters into an approximation of the SF2 fighting system in order not to draw a swift cease and desist like Capcom did to Rockmen R.

Google translation FTW!


That I can agree to.

So what exactly is Street Fighter 2? A bunch of sprites, some music and sound effects, and specific animations, hitboxes, and behaviors. The gameplay comes entirely from the animations, timing, and hitboxes, and priority of moves. So in order to make any clone of Street Fighter 2, you need to figure out all the animations, hitboxes, and state transitions. That defines the game mechanics of Street Fighter II.

It's very surreal that Capcom officially released a fan game. Maybe when my weapon-select HUD for Zombies Ate My Neighbors is finished, I can get LucasArts to rerelease the game as ZAMN - Now With a Feature It Bloody Well Should've Had.

I do not understand this fixation with keeping things so IP-safe. The (100% non-commercial) projects that get their plugs pulled are the stupid ones that decide that they should send their unfinished progress to gaming blogs and other similar sites and have the name plastered everywhere. The solution isn't to make the NES equivelent of "GNU/gOpenFight" but just to not blatantly scream to everyone that you're cloning Street Fighter II.

SFxMM wasn't developed with permission, it was developed quietly as a Mega Man fan game and then capcom was approached. Do you think it was developed as "GNU/kFreeShootJumpGameWithFighers" and then Mega Man was put in later? Absolutely not!

I agree. There is no worry about a C&D if you just do it and release it freely. So you can scratch that off the list of reasons why it won't happen. it probably still won't happen though. But it would be cool if it did.

How can the developers be sure that a tester won't leak unfinished progress to the gaming press?

And no, distributing the final product without charge isn't foolproof. I can think of several video game publishers known for cease-and-desisting freeware projects.

That has been done couldn't be undone. There was SoRR, it got C&D from Sega, but you still can easily get a copy.

If you've finished the project, and released it for free, who gives a damn if it gets a C&D? People will still copy it and distribute it - like SoRR. Again, the projects that *have* been C&D'd very frequently were stupidly loudly announced.

I want to again bring a reminder that SFxMM was a fangame made with Capcom's IP the whole time.

Or just that it becomes so well known that it reaches the press anyway? That's what happened with SoRR (which was mentioned later in the thread). Then again, the issue with SoRR is that it was better than the other three entries put together, and Sega was trying to rerelease SoR2 on iOS at the same time the final version of SoRR would have been out (if I recall correctly). Cue how well that went.