Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II Champion Edition is an unofficial conversion of Capcom's classic arcade game for the C64. Paco Herrera, the programmer who has undertaken this project, provided us with some exclusive insights into the development and future of the release, exclusive? Yes... what do you expect? This is ZZAP! 64.
“It started as a crazy learning exercise: back in 2016, my Father gave me an eBook reader as a birthday present, I loaded a few C64 assembler books into it, then I installed a 6502 cross-compiler and started to try basic things (sprites, bitmaps, arithmetic operations). The next thing I did was to set myself a goal: to make a full C64 game. As Street Fighter II was one of my all-time favourite games, and I was very let down when I played the US Gold official C64 conversion for the first time in 1993, I chose to make a decent conversion. Maybe
I should have started with something simpler like a Tetris clone, I know.
My first intention was to make both disk and cartridge version, but finally, I dropped the disk version because the loading times were too long due to the amount of data the game needs to load between stages. Also, it was to be a two or even three-disk game (even with compression!) and the cartridge allows me to have more free memory for code. The Champion Edition features the ability to play with all 12 fighters (including the four bosses: Balrog, Vega, Sagat and M.Bison). SF2CE utilises joystick-only, and I have tried to respect the original joystick controls as this will allow veteran SF2 players to catch up with the playability easily. The game runs at 50FPS, PAL only, and
I'm not sure if I'll be able to release an NTSC version, and it will be 100% free as I don't have any permission from the IP owner to sell it. Regarding the options, there is the one-player mode, a two-player mode, a battle mode (two 6-fighter teams fight against each other), a built-in cheat mode and a music player. As I am not a musician, nor a graphic artist, I'm getting help for both areas from Narciso Quintana “Narcisound” and Igor Errazkin “Errazking”. You may recall that Narcisound wrote the music for Jai Alai (1991, Opera Sport, C64) and is currently making music for new C64 and Amiga games. Errazking has released several SEUCK games and C64 graphics and is currently working on ‘Mazinger Z C64' and the backdrops for SF2CE. I also have discussed the manual and cover art with freelance artist Juan Carlos
Pastor “Denymetanol”.
When will this be released? I can't give you a release date as I'm working on it in my spare time, and neither are both Narcisound and Errazking. I'd love to release it this year, but I'm not 100% sure I'm going to make it. The combat engine is 95% finished and most of the game is done (intro, menus, pre and post-combat screens, sprites), but I'd like to add a couple of things such as bonus screens and a few more special moves (hold and throw, hold and hit and more).”