Hi, fellow arcade gamers,
Something has been irking me for a long time now. Back in the day at several spots, I encountered Street Fighter II arcade cabinets (original SF2) that played like the normal game with one key difference: all background elements normally hidden in Ken’s and Chun Li’s stages were displayed. This would be a Taipei street sign and a trash bin in Chun Li’s stage and a set of large chains in Ken’s stage. I’ll add some pictures later if I can track them down. It seemed the only foreground tile maps that survived were the fence on the left and pulley and chain system in Zangief’s stage and Sagat’s palm tree, the second of which they of course removed in Champion Edition on forward.
Now, if you use an emulator like Final Burn that allows you to disable graphics layers, load up whichever original SF2 ROM, and then you get to Ken’s or Chun Li’s stages, next you can disable everything except for these hidden foreground layers (I forget which one… Layer 1 maybe?), you will see the graphics I speak of. You can also go into the test menu with DIP C8 and look through the SCROLL1 objects and you’ll eventually find them, among the familiar gfx and some unused gfx.
However, when I was a kid, I on rare occasions saw at arcades and a CA campground once with the SF2 arcade all these layers present with the extra tile maps on top. I can’t tell you what revisions/hacks these were or if they were bootlegs, nor do I remember if they were the original outer cabs or not, but they were all running the original Street Fighter II game without wildly accentuated special moves with 10,000 fireballs and crack speed typical in the hacks lol. Officially, Capcom masked out Ken’s and Chun Li’s foreground gfx by throwing them in the very back in terms of priority of all present gfx layers; like I said with my Final Burn findings, they truly are always there, yet just underneath all the other layers.
With all that being said, has anyone else ever seen these extra graphics out in the wild too, or am I experiencing the Mandela Effect, like hardcore?
P.S. While I haven’t found a hack that does this yet, I would love to have one that enables these hidden foreground layers. I dunno, I just think they’re cool and add extra detail to the already detailed world of SF2.
Something has been irking me for a long time now. Back in the day at several spots, I encountered Street Fighter II arcade cabinets (original SF2) that played like the normal game with one key difference: all background elements normally hidden in Ken’s and Chun Li’s stages were displayed. This would be a Taipei street sign and a trash bin in Chun Li’s stage and a set of large chains in Ken’s stage. I’ll add some pictures later if I can track them down. It seemed the only foreground tile maps that survived were the fence on the left and pulley and chain system in Zangief’s stage and Sagat’s palm tree, the second of which they of course removed in Champion Edition on forward.
Now, if you use an emulator like Final Burn that allows you to disable graphics layers, load up whichever original SF2 ROM, and then you get to Ken’s or Chun Li’s stages, next you can disable everything except for these hidden foreground layers (I forget which one… Layer 1 maybe?), you will see the graphics I speak of. You can also go into the test menu with DIP C8 and look through the SCROLL1 objects and you’ll eventually find them, among the familiar gfx and some unused gfx.
However, when I was a kid, I on rare occasions saw at arcades and a CA campground once with the SF2 arcade all these layers present with the extra tile maps on top. I can’t tell you what revisions/hacks these were or if they were bootlegs, nor do I remember if they were the original outer cabs or not, but they were all running the original Street Fighter II game without wildly accentuated special moves with 10,000 fireballs and crack speed typical in the hacks lol. Officially, Capcom masked out Ken’s and Chun Li’s foreground gfx by throwing them in the very back in terms of priority of all present gfx layers; like I said with my Final Burn findings, they truly are always there, yet just underneath all the other layers.
With all that being said, has anyone else ever seen these extra graphics out in the wild too, or am I experiencing the Mandela Effect, like hardcore?
P.S. While I haven’t found a hack that does this yet, I would love to have one that enables these hidden foreground layers. I dunno, I just think they’re cool and add extra detail to the already detailed world of SF2.
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