wrt how long it’s taken thus far… so you know how 2i has built-in wide from the service menu? if you inspect the eeprom save before and after changing that setting to on, it’s just a toggle in two bytes. those same two bytes toggle wide in NG and 3s.
if you boot up 3rd strike in widescreen mode by setting these same bytes in the eeprom, you can see the state that the capcom devs left 3s wide in. all of the UI is the same as in 4:3:
so I had to undertake a study in order to understand how to change these HUD tiles. they’re basically the same as when the game draws text on the screen, just like in text 0×20 is blank. each tile on the grid is made up of what to draw and then the following entry is a modifier (HP bar can be green or orange, for example).
then I had to go through and change the locations of where this stuff was being drawn on the screen. there’s two different HUD tile drawing functions in use, static and dynamic. the static ones are relatively straightforward, like for example the portrait of P2, it only gets drawn once. just modify the tile position once and you’re done. however for the dynamic entries, they are much more complicated and their position of being drawn is based in code. so for like meter update, hp update, etc, they took a long time to determine how each one works, via reading disassembly.
and if you look at the score for p1, it’s overlapping the timer. the timer had to be moved. there was sooooooo much stuff that had to get changed.
That’s crazy how quick it comes together, what inspires you to come up with working on a specific game?
I like thinking about new ways to play games. other mods I did are ratio for mvc2 and kof98, so taking one of these great old games and tweaking them to be played differently. I thought about how playing one of the vs games in co-op with a friend on fightcade could be pretty fun, and I realized that it probably wouldn’t be too complicated to switch the controls dynamically.
Would you consider a widescreen mod for Street Fighter Alpha 3
this is way beyond my ability. the only reason I can do 3s wide is because there was a wide mode in 2i and the capcom devs left most of it in 3s. I’m just cleaning that up. cps3 also has native widescreen output, cps2 doesn’t, I’m not sure where to begin on a job like that.