Street Figher 2 SCE

I'm doing some hacking work on the PC-Engine version of CE (which some of that includes upgrading/increasing the colors for the BGs, as well as more detail).

This got me thinking, long with the Overdrive demo (and a few other demo effects). How many colors can you reload per scanline, without turning off the display? At least 3 colors per scanline, before you see artifacts on screen?

That got me wondering. Might be possible, if there's enough free cpu resource per frame, to do some hsync color upgrades to the game. By designing backgrounds that can use reload cram slots tricks - on an hblank interrupt.

This can only lead to good. Keep thinking, Tom!

Not doing it for Genesis ? Either Genesis or TG, can you make waves move or twinkle like it's moving slow in Ken background (always bothered me ocean waves looked like frozen lake waves) or make clouds move in Blanka Genesis version ? Imagine 512 colors on Blanka Genesis stage ah man.

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Originally Posted by Vector

Not doing it for Genesis ? Either Genesis or TG, can you make waves move or twinkle like it's moving slow in Ken background (always bothered me ocean waves looked like frozen lake waves)

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I don't think any versions of the game do that, not even the Arcade or Saturn/PS1/Dreamcast/PS2/360/PS3 ports:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJZB6wHz-s8&t=4m40s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k7Nnh6mqu4&t=6m8s

So I don't think that's really something feasible or worth doing. There's no animation from any other versions to try and convert over for that, and it's not accurate to the original versions anyways.

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Originally Posted by Vector

or make clouds move in Blanka Genesis version ?

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Now that might be doable since that actually does exist in other versions and might be possible using tile priorities or something. Though I'll let someone more qualified take care of that one.

Cool Treks.

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Originally Posted by Vector

Not doing it for Genesis ? Either Genesis or TG, can you make waves move or twinkle like it's moving slow in Ken background (always bothered me ocean waves looked like frozen lake waves) or make clouds move in Blanka Genesis version ? Imagine 512 colors on Blanka Genesis stage ah man.

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512 color version is out of the question. The effect in Overdrive is cpu sync'd timed code to the display device, along with turning on/off the display stuff. You quickly eat up almost all your cpu time during active display, and you lose sprite pixel bandwidth per scanline (how much, I'm not sure). But you could still do the lesser version of that trick, for more colors. Just not 512 on screen.

Clouds moving in Blanka's stage on the Genesis would be tricky. The tree and the house are on two different layers. There isn't a third BG layer to put that on (though you could on the SNES with mode 1. And the SuperGrafx with its third layer made of all separate sprites). If the display bar was made like it is in the PCE version (stretched out to the edges of the screen), you could use a high priority part of a BG map+vscroll table update. Then at the transition point, right above the mountain line in the far background, the foreground tree becomes a cell of sprites, allowing the cloud to exist on a BG layer and go behind the house. You don't want the clouds to be a sprite layer, because it's wider than the tree. The down side to that, is that the tree edges would flicker (or just blank out) if both players jump up and there frames combined exceed the sprite pixel scanline limit.

There's another way to handle the clouds, but it would loose all detail inside the cloud area (keeping everything else the same as the original genesis game stage). It would just be pure white, the edges would be sprites. The sprites mask the edges of the cloud, which are just tilemap updates. Might even be able to do something like half tile transitions, so the sprites don't have to be so large. The straight edge of the house (tiles), on the right side could be set as a higher priority than the cloud edge sprites, clipping them as it scrolls by. But the cloud height couldn't exceed the flat edge of the house, because the straw top is not a straight edge transition.

Updating the wave tiles in Ken's stage might be doable, even if it wasn't originally in the arcade versions. Depends on how much vram is available for caching that update. It's not like you need to do a single screen update - in one frame. It could be a slow animation update.
left(old), right(new)
Can't animate the clouds on the PCE one, but we did update the graphics for it:
http://www.pcedev.net/sf2/sf2blanka_compare.png
http://www.pcedev.net/sf2/sf2blanka_stage.png
http://www.pcedev.net/sf2/sf2blanka_pal.png

The last one is the subpalette map. The game actually throws away 30 colors, because it wastes two 15 color BG subpalettes just for the font and status bar. There are a lot of unused subpalettes for the sprites, but you can't use them for BG stuffs :/

Edited for great english!

Incredible Tom, thanks. So it's not impossible for you to update genesis rom with waves and clouds per say nor add more colors. Outstanding. Damn PCE clouds won't move though. Perhaps if layers are a trouble for genesis sf2ce, maybe genesis ssf2 ? I guess both genesis games use same layers for stuff. So I guess only the SF2WW on snes and ssf2t on 3do have clouds move. Yeah giving waves illusion of some kind of movement even though it didn't in arcade is ok with me, that frozen lake effect wave while it's actual warm and sunny with ship bopping in ocean yet waves are still always bugged me ha.

It's possible to have a moving cloud layer on the Genesis, if done right. Whether it can be hacked into the existing game constraints, because of how it would have to be handled, is something else entirely. I'd say the water animation is much more doable as a hack upgrade, to the game. But without looking at it in detail, I can't say for sure on that either.

Just out of curiosity, does PCE SF2 have a debug mode in it? Back in the day, I was playing the Genesis version and it crashed during a fight with M Bison. An error code was displayed and a hex memory viewer came up. Shortly after that incident my Gen quit working altogether and I had to get another one. But I have never seen the debug mode again since then.

@tomaitheous
I wonder if it would be possible to hack the Genesis ROM and use the BG #0 color trick to create some nicer looking color gradients (like there's in Street Racer and Shadow of the Beast II) in Blanka's, Guile's and Ryu's (and a few others) stages.

About the Blanka's stage:
I think it would look MUCH better if we put the house in the same layer of the three. I know that we would lose the stupid very little parallax that there's between the house and the tree/crowd layer, but, seriously, placing it in the same position of the PCE's version would be very fine with me and most of people wouldn't even notice the difference.
Then, I think we could (I hope I'm not saying a HUGE stupidity here but...) move the "cloud" by using cell scrolling. We could also use line scrolling to give water movement to the water (not scrolling it just in one direction but alternating the direction for a given number of lines and moving it back and forth all the time; it doesn't need to be fast either).
We could also set the scrolling range progressively descending from the beginning of the water to the clouds in other to give it some depth sensation while scrolling the screen, and then defining that whole green "stripe" (supposed to be mountains in the horizon I think) with the same scrolling speed/range.
That way we would have moving clouds + water animation + parallax between the clouds and the mountains, and between the mountains and the water.
IDK if it's all doable/feasible though...

Sounds good Barone, what about Ken stage water waves, use white twinkles back and forth near top of waves ?

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Originally Posted by bakemono

Just out of curiosity, does PCE SF2 have a debug mode in it? Back in the day, I was playing the Genesis version and it crashed during a fight with M Bison. An error code was displayed and a hex memory viewer came up. Shortly after that incident my Gen quit working altogether and I had to get another one. But I have never seen the debug mode again since then.

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Not that I'm aware of, yet.

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Originally Posted by Barone

@tomaitheous
I wonder if it would be possible to hack the Genesis ROM and use the BG #0 color trick to create some nicer looking color gradients (like there's in Street Racer and Shadow of the Beast II) in Blanka's, Guile's and Ryu's (and a few others) stages.

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That's pretty much along the lines I was thinking. But I'm pretty sure you can update at least 3 color slots without dot/pixel artifacts on screen. Designing a BG image specifically around that, you could add more color, as well as possibly free up some color access across tiles (you don't gain more colors per se, but you gain more freedom of where those colors can be used - thus a better looking pic).

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About the Blanka's stage:
I think it would look MUCH better if we put the house in the same layer of the three. I know that we would lose the stupid very little parallax that there's between the house and the tree/crowd layer, but, seriously, placing it in the same position of the PCE's version would be very fine with me and most of people wouldn't even notice the difference.
Then, I think we could (I hope I'm not saying a HUGE stupidity here but...) move the "cloud" by using cell scrolling. We could also use line scrolling to give water movement to the water (not scrolling it just in one direction but alternating the direction for a given number of lines and moving it back and forth all the time; it doesn't need to be fast either).
We could also set the scrolling range progressively descending from the beginning of the water to the clouds in other to give it some depth sensation while scrolling the screen, and then defining that whole green "stripe" (supposed to be mountains in the horizon I think) with the same scrolling speed/range.
That way we would have moving clouds + water animation + parallax between the clouds and the mountains, and between the mountains and the water.
IDK if it's all doable/feasible though...

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Very doable. The house is so close to the tree scrolling plane, that is almost makes no difference if it did scroll at a different rate. Yeah, the clouds and line scroll water of the lake - would be a much more noticeable difference.

Can you do a Rainbow Hack on the PC Engine?

I don't know about Switches Chars by hitting Select

Can it be done?

How are the improvements coming along ?

While you're changing the graphics would it at all be possible to tweak the sound engine so the voice samples sound clearer and possibly touch up the music to sound more like the Arcade?