Street Fighter 2: Sheng Long arcade hack

[Drakon]

I modified the m5 roms to run on an actual cps1 arcade pcb. I further modified the roms so the computer opponent doesn't teleport into your face and I changed certain moves to make them way more fun. Yay for hex editing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA1paCx00LQ

[d123456]

I modified the m5 roms to run on an actual cps1 arcade pcb. I further modified the roms so the computer opponent doesn't teleport into your face and I changed certain moves to make them way more fun. Yay for hex editing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA1paCx00LQ

Holy fuksmokes, you´ve now further modified a SF hack? Tell us more in detail, please share a link where you fight the computer. I´d love to see 2 expert SF gamers duke it out in this new version. This is awesome, must be difficult.

[Drakon]

Sorry havn't been checking posts I was busy updating my hack and have since added a lot of features. Revision 3 is finally done.

Here's a demonstration video showing the moves and physics changes:

http://www.youtube.com/v/2E1PBFAFH04

Guile playthrough:

http://www.youtube.com/v/yk4-tFNcynE

Regarding the difficulty I did modify the crud out of the game but I did my best to try to keep it balanced so it's actually still very playable.

It gets stuck in the special ending but that's probably because I changed so many fireball physics and other things. I can worry about changing it back later but it's no big deal everything else is fine.

Copying my writeup that I posted on another forum:

This all started out simply as a curiosity project of mine. Since the dumped street fighter 2 arcade hacks played just like the real thing and used data from the regular champion edition dump I was curious what exaclty makes these bootleg hacks "tick". The bootleg hack dumps only contain two files which are roms that contain the game programming, the rest of the files it uses are from champion edition. Here's a look at the m5 roms in a hex editor compared to the normal champion edition rom. The champion edition rom is the code at the top:



You can see that the M5 hack roms have the data split in an interleaved pattern. I found a dos based tool on the internet that interleaved the two files back together and this's what it turned into:



The code looks pretty much the same as champion edition so obviously this game is just a severely hacked up champion edition rom. I tried burning these roms and running them on my cps1 but sprites weren't drawing properly and it wasn't reading controller inputs. I took a look inside the cps1.c file that emulators use and certainly enough the m5 bootleg and other bootlegs were only released on custom bootleg pcbs that draw sprites in the opposite direction and have different controller inputs. Luckily the m5 hack says "920313" on it so I took the 920313 champion edition roms and copied parts of hex from the champion edition dumps into my cleaned up m5 dumps until I got the game running as a normal cps1 game in an emulator. Then I burned the game to eproms and it ran fine on my cps1 arcade board. I found some programming I forgot to copy that was causing the game to crash and fixed it.

The next step was to improve this hack. Since I got the hack roms compatible with champion edition I was able to "reverse engineer" the code by copying hex from the champion edition roms until it affected the programming I was looking to change. Basically anything that they bothered changing between champion edition and the m5 hack I was able to hunt down and change myself. I did the following...

I removed the computer opponents ability to teleport into my face whenever it felt like it as this was more annoying than anything. I made ryu and kens uppercuts launch you across the screen. I made guiles bicycle kick launch you across the screen thanks to some code I found in the m6 dump. I made sagats uppercut launch you across the screen again thanks to code from m6. I changed the bootup screen from saying "920313" to saying "SHENG LONG" just so people would know the name of my custom hack. I changed a LOT of physics like the speed of dhalsims jump, the distance of characters jumps, and how fast characters move left and right.

I also had to use the 21 rom from redwave because whoever dumped the m5 bootleg forgot to dump the 21 rom which contained some of the hacked programming. In fact running M5 on an emulator it's missing that undumped programming. I found a guy who actually own a M5 bootleg pcb and he confirmed that my m5 version with the redwave 21 rom runs just like the pcb. Before I used the red wave 21 rom the fireballs moved at normal speed but on the m5 pcb they're severely slowed down so you can flood the screen with them. Luckily all of these hacks were made by the same company so a lot of them share the same hacked code.

I tried using the mame debug mode to help me find more hex values to change but mame debug is complicated and not user friendly at all so I gave up on using that. If there's anyone who's good with using mame debug mode to help me find other areas of the code to edit that would be much appreciated. Physics in the game such at super move horizontal and vertical speed are adjustable simply by changing 1 hex value for each. Once I find the hex value it's just a matter of tweaking it so it looks great and so the character doesn't glitch out of the software and endlessly fall through the floor.

I'm happy to announce that I'm capable of converting cps1 street fighter 2 champion edition, turbo, and even rainbow into the m5 hack. I can also convert a board to rainbow set 3, or my custom hack. These unofficial champion edition hacks contain a lot of stuff that was later used in official capcom games and they're very well made. Some of these hacks even tried to balance the game out by making previously weak characters more powerful to even the playing field. Not all of the things they changed were great ideas but there certainly is a lot of great things that were added to the game through these various hacks.

Also I've added a lot of my own insanity to these hacks and took all the parts of the hacks that I liked and combined them. I've changed a lot of physics to my liking and most of these physics changes are all custom and were never featured in any other hack.

[Drakon]

I removed the other videos as they're now out of date.

Here's revision 4 of sheng long edition this'll probably be the final version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wmQhpmHm7k

Here's the sister hack "punishment edition". This hack is completely non serious and it's completely insane.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPJrdKDEGGg

[d123456]

How is it playing against the CPU in Sheng Long V.4?
I think it is awesome what you´re doing. I hope some day we can all hack our favorite Street Fighting games to our liking. I want a punishing CPU who go nuts and I have to wait and keep blocking until a small window of opportunity arises. Keep us posted. What is this other Forum you mention? AO?

[Drakon]

How is it playing against the CPU in Sheng Long V.4?
I think it is awesome what you´re doing. I hope some day we can all hack our favorite Street Fighting games to our liking. I want a punishing CPU who go nuts and I have to wait and keep blocking until a small window of opportunity arises. Keep us posted. What is this other Forum you mention? AO?

CPU in sheng long is easier at times and harder at other times. Certain characters now move super fast (zangief dhalsim vega) so if they want to get in your face it's not a lot harder to get away. Same thing with when ken feels like uppercutting like crazy or ryu feels like shooting lots of fireballs but I purposely changed physics so every character can jump or air move over a screen full of fireballs. With my hack I tried to re-balance the game so characters that used to be weak are now much harder so you have to be careful. Also the matches are shorter than usual as every character is stronger than they used to be. I'm going to record a playthrough of sheng long later and also I'll record a punishment edition playthrough where I cycle through different characters while playing. I have the pcb set to the easiest difficulty I havn't tried changing the dip switches and seeing what happens. Personally with the amount of sf and various fighting games capcom released they already released what I consider the best fighting games. It's just I love sf2 so much and I love some of the ideas used in the illegal hacks and also later capcom games that were obviously inspired by the bootleg hacks from taiwan. So I decided to make my own hacks that bring all the insane things together.

The other forum is my forum which is listed in my signature, I have no idea what AO is.

[Drakon]

Got some new videos. Punishment edition running on my cps1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIOSN04h6zA&feature=youtu.be

A playthrough of punishment edition featuring every character in the game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si5Xn97LtgM&feature=youtu.be

I also found in the last version of sheng long you could really abuse the double hadouken fireballs with certain characters so I modified the moves so the game is way more balanced and fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wKCBcMQVUg&feature=youtu.be

[d123456]

Awesome vids. Would it be possible to:
-Take out throws alltogether, except zangiefs piledriver for instance
-Take out dizzying
-Make all attacks take off half of the damage it does take normally?
Perhaps you could ask the best players (in the world) in which ways you can make this game better.
Would it be possible to create ex moves like say throw a fireball, but using 2 punch buttons, which will then unleash many more fireballs then regular moves, but there offcourse should be a catch like more vulnerability.

Thanks for all the work and vids. It´s amazing what you´re doing

[Drakon]

Awesome vids. Would it be possible to:
-Take out throws alltogether, except zangiefs piledriver for instance
-Take out dizzying
-Make all attacks take off half of the damage it does take normally?
Perhaps you could ask the best players (in the world) in which ways you can make this game better.
Would it be possible to create ex moves like say throw a fireball, but using 2 punch buttons, which will then unleash many more fireballs then regular moves, but there offcourse should be a catch like more vulnerability.

Thanks for all the work and vids. It´s amazing what you´re doing

None of that would be possible without the original game source code. I didn't actually program in the extra stuff I "stole" the code from the m5 hack and copied and pasted it. I then manipulated when the m5 code is called and also manipulated a lot of the physics of jumping and such. I can't change anything that the hackers didn't change in the m5 hack. I haven't been re-programming the game and compiling the code I'd literally been manipulating raw hex data manually. It's actually quite amazing that I even managed to pull off this much just by copying and pasting chunks of hex data. Without the source code for the game and a compiler there's no way hacking like what you describe can be done.

Also here's a m. bison playthrough of the latest sheng long release:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdo8pGUQ3hU&feature=youtu.be

send me a pm if you want me to e-mail you a version that you can play on an emulator and even a pcb.

[d123456]

I can't change anything that the hackers didn't change in the m5 hack.

Ah, I fully understand. Thanks for another video I am going to enjoy right now
Does this mean that m5 had access to the source code?
That and I pm´d begging for a rom
Do you know about the SNES world warriors hacks that enabled the bosses?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPor-Plk5yA
Those were great until hyper fighting was released. How were those created? also access to source code?