Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Let's play Street Fighter 2



I love it when I can give a post a title that doesn't sound like it belongs on this blog. But we're going to play the game in DOS - not the Ocean conversion, but an interesting homebrew port.


Before you complain to me for saving the screenshots in low quality jpeg, let me explain: A young Korean programmer named Jung Young Dug decided shortly after the release of Street Fighter II, that it would be awesome to play the game on PC. (Apparently the game by Ocean wasn't available in Korea.) But all he had to work with was his SNES version and a TV capture card. That's how he got the graphics for his game.



The game is based on the very first release of SF2, The World Warrior. It has a few shortcomings, though. The bosses are not in the game (a few normal character backgrounds are replaced with boss stages), and when selecting Dhalsim for some reason it just loads Ken. Dhalsim's stage and portrait are in, so maybe it's just a bug. Some special moves can also be done in mid-air, like in those cheap bootleg hacks. The version I have is labeled "Beta Version", don't know if there is a more complete one out there. The game files also seem to have been meddled with by third parties...



It runs a bit choppy, too, but the controls are simply the best I've ever seen in a DOS-based fighting game. Would have been cool to see Jung work with a professional team on an original fighter, that could have been awesome. Some of the issues might be caused by DOSBox, as the game doesn't work too great with it. Sometimes when I made a screenshot, the game just crashed.



It also allows mirror matches, but the colors for the second player are really weird. The game also allows for some really odd options. You can set a fight to 99 rounds that all run for 999 seconds each - when you set both character's attack level to zero and defence level to maximum, some rounds can even take that long.



The music is all rearranged in midi, the tunes range from barely recognizable to surprisingly awesome. The fighters have additional voice samples when they win a round. Some are ripped from action movies, but others clearly recorded by Jung himself and sound very goofy.

Have a listen:
Music

Voice Sample



I would also upload a video, but the game runs really slow when DOSBox is recording. But I've got something better for you. Here are the game files for download:

Street Fighter 2 Homebrew DOS Port



When releasing the game, the programmer had the decency to reference to Capcom and Nintendo in, but in August 1994, a book was published boldy titled "Game Programming with the Creator of SF-2" - The author was Jung Young Dug.



7 comments:

  1. This homemade conversion was SO AWESOME back in 1994, if you were the one kid on the block with a PC and not a SNES, like I was. It was like my one triumph on the game front, I had an SF2 with more characters and Chun-Li could shoot fireballs and shit! I won that battle, thanks to Jung Young Dug. Hero among men.

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  2. So interesting, thank you :D Regards from Spain ;)

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  3. Very interesting. Another game that nailed the controls in a DOS-based fighting game was One Must Fall 2097. And really, how can you go wrong with giant robots fighting each other?

    Oh, wait. Rise of the Robots. Never mind.

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  4. Ah, good ol' SF2IBM. You can find more info on it here http://www.scary-crayon.com/games/sf2pc/ and here http://syste.ms/sfliu.html

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  5. Cool, they have a more complete version than the one I used. Thanks for the link.

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  6. Jaja, muy bueno, yo tenía esta version trucha en mi pc cuando era niño. Gracias por los recuerdos!

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  7. I remember playing this. I even used a hex editor to translate it into English. PC games back then were completely inferior to the consoles of the time. The reverse is true today of course.

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