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Mystic_Merlin · Joined: 15 Oct 2007 Posts: 496 Location: Bangkok

Street Fighter 2 was one of the most sold cartridge on the SNES. Not surprisingly it was also one of the most pirated game.
I came across 2 really odd ones I thought I'd share with you.

The first one appears to be a regular cartridge adapter you would use to bypass the physical limitations of inserting a US/JAP cart in a SNES/SFC and vice versa.

I didn't pay too much attention to the SF2 sticker until I opened it up to reveal a 16Mb eprom which is indeed SF2.
The clever part is there's no CIC in the adapter as it's using the one from the cartridge you insert in the top slot.
I believe this type of workaround was a common practice when the first SNES pirate carts were sold as the CIC might have not been cloned at that time or hard to source or it was simply to save some production cost.

/RD and /ROMSEL are redirected to the side to 2 unpopulated DPDT switches. By cutting a few lines you could install a toggle switch to choose between SF2 and the top cartridge.

Mystic_Merlin · Joined: 15 Oct 2007 Posts: 496 Location: Bangkok

The second oddity is this SF3 cartridge which as you may guess is a hacked SF2.
Now you can find tons of SF2 hacks but back then it was not so common and this one shows as it's littered with gfx and palette bugs.

Nonetheless it's a very fun hack that introduces new moves such as flying hadoken, dragon punch, tatsu and very slow fireballs for ryu/ken for instance.
You can achieve new types of combos, these hacks must have prolonged the lifespan of the game before the release of SF2 Turbo.

There's no mention of Capcom anywhere, they even got rid of the intro logo.
Not sure it would have made this thing any more legal but hey, those were the days we were still figuring things out... Laughing

This hack is based on the US version of the rom, I guess I could create an IPS patch for those interested.

mrforever · Joined: 19 Nov 2007 Posts: 75

Hi Mystic,
u can dump together?
thank you mate

Trenton_net · Joined: 29 Jun 2006 Posts: 233

Slightly off topic: I can't believe we're all still here after 15+ years, talking about obscure hardware no one outside of a handful of members even remember (^_^);

Mystic_Merlin · Joined: 15 Oct 2007 Posts: 496 Location: Bangkok

Mystic_Merlin · Joined: 15 Oct 2007 Posts: 496 Location: Bangkok

Here's the IPS of the SF3 cartridge. I've looked up several SF2 hacks online and while modifications are minors and already seen in some of those hacks, this specific version seems to be undumped.

mrforever · Joined: 19 Nov 2007 Posts: 75

[quote="Mystic_Merlin"]Here's the IPS of the SF3 cartridge. I've looked up several SF2 hacks online and while modifications are minors and already seen in some of those hacks, this specific version seems to be undumped.[/quote]

thank you mate