Games
Remaking Street Fighter
This is an old post, from March 31, 2008. I hope to update it with a progress report here in 2025.
So Capcom’s remaking their seminal beat-em-up with all-new high-def graphics for the XBox 360 Live Arcade. It’s gonna be the same gameplay we know and love with a glorious new skin.
But Capcom’s not alone in doing a Street Fighter remix. While the PC Engine version of Street Fighter 2: CE was the best looking 16-bit version of the game, it turns out that NEC Avenue didn’t do the best job possible when porting it to the PCE. Their choice of colours was often poor, and despite having two and a half times more storage than the next largest HuCard, they cut a lot of detail from the backgrounds.
Determined to right this wrong, some hardcore fans are adding more details, sourcing graphics from the arcade and other console ports, and converting them to the PC Engine’s tile-based 9-bit colour palette. Then they’re going to shove the graphics back into the PC Engine game, creating the ultimate 16-bit Street Fighter.
Check out these screenshots:
In the Guile stage you can see they’ve added two missing characters on the left side. The background has been darkened, the sky looks better, and the shading on the jet was completely reworked. And now the people in the background have accurate skin tones.
The most obvious change to the Ryu stage is the addition of the moon, which the Megadrive/Genesis version had, but the PC Engine did not. So Frag and Tom copied it from the arcade version. The colours have also been tweaked: the wooden planks are less garish, the background tiles less green. The sky’s shading has been changed, and the castle in the background has more detail.
I’ve just completed an interview with the two guys doing this update, Fragmare and Tomaitheo.
NFG: So guys, what’s the plan?
Tom: the plan’s complicated.
NFG: What’s your bullet point list?
Frag: Just touching up a few graphics, and translating the character blurbs and endings.
Tom:
1. Update some of the BGs with new detail.
2. Identify all the code banks and see if it can fit with in the 256k CD ram limit, if so then the ACD project begins
3. Do an SGX port/update
Frag: And possibly adding some missing stuff back in, like the intro with the guys fighting, the missing bonus stage and a hyper fighting mode.
NFG: A HuCard, CD/Arcade Card and a SuperGrafx release? That’s pretty ambitious. How confident are you it can be done?
Tom: The PCE and SuperGrafx HuCard releases are definite. The Arcade Card port is a little iffy. (The Arcade Card is a rarely used 2MByte RAM card for use with CD games. –Ed)
NFG: Can you fit all of that in the 20Mbit HuCard?
Frag: Well, i’m absolutely sure we can get all the translating and stage fixes hacked into the ROM with relatively little effort. Anything that can keep the ROM at or under it’s existing 20Mbit size is easily doable. The modifications to the levels don’t really add much, if anything, to the total size of the graphic data in the ROM.
Tom: The SF2 rom is packed tight, only a few 1-2k segments here and there that I plan to use for the new BG details. There’s no room for hyper fighting, it would need to be an expanded rom or Arcade Card hack.
NFG: Why do you need to stick to 20Mbit (2.5 Megabytes)? Surely the PCE can handle larger cards?
Frag: Anything that puts the ROM over 20Mbit won’t allow it to be tested on any known PCE emulators.
NFG: What are you planning to do with the more powerful SuperGrafx hardware?
Tom: Just some extra scrolls.
NFG: Extra parallax in the backgrounds etc?
Tom: Yeah, and the missing third elephant [from Dhalsim’s stage).
NFG: Elephants are good.
Tom: That third elephant is so elusive, ya know.
NFG: Elephants are so unpredictable.
Tom: Especially in groups of three.
NFG: Two pairs of three, no less.
Tom: Hah! Even more so! We’re going to use the extra sprite layer of the SuperGrafx for the third elephant’s scrolling layer. We also plan to add more of the arcade background details to the SGX port.
NFG: Anything else you’re planning to do?
Frag: We are also changing the name slightly. Hardcore SF2 fans might groan, but PCE fans will laugh… We are renaming it to Fighting Street II. I think Fighting Street II – Turbo Champion Edition sounds about right.
This image is missing to the mists of time and internet rot.
--NFG
[ Oct 9 2025 ]
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Passerby 1
Oct 19 2025