street fighter, more like, uh, sheet...highlighter

December 23, 2021 11:45 AM

Fabien Sanglard looks into when Capcom stopped laying out CPS-1 arcade sprite sheets by hand with scissors.
posted by cortex (11 comments total)

And there's also a really good supplemental article on how Capcom fixed a spelling mistake using sprite layering.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:02 PM on December 23, 2021 [15 favorites]

What a neat article! Thanks for posting it, cortex! As a Street Fighter devotee since 1991, and quite possibly the world's biggest Blanka fan, I really appreciate seeing stuff like this.

(BTW, if anyone has seen a 1993 Ace Novelty Blanka plush anywhere, let me know. I'll make it worth your while.)
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:04 PM on December 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is a really damn cool article. Good find.
posted by azpenguin at 12:49 PM on December 23, 2021

Moving cartoon figures around on a grid seems like how I would have designed a videogame when I was 10.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 1:02 PM on December 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

Excellent post. I found a Tumblr post which talks about how the sprites were digitized (converted into pixels and entered into the ROM) in the era, which claims Capcom used a X68000 workstation. I assume another artist did the coloring and shading and palette choices as the paper sheets were digitized.

There's a lot of other stuff on Fabien's site worth perusing, I'll have to bookmark for later.
posted by credulous at 1:39 PM on December 23, 2021

I read this the other day and didn't even realize it was Fabians blog. Definitely poke around some of his other articles if you like this stuff. He's a great engineer.

Moreover, it also reminds me of Miyamoto showing the original graph paper drawings for making Super Mario Bros.
posted by lkc at 3:33 PM on December 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Very cool.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:46 PM on December 23, 2021

That was fascinating! Thank you!
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:34 PM on December 23, 2021

The SF2 articles were interesting, but they led me to read the excellent series of articles on Another World/Out of This World that clearly explain how different the Amiga/ST/PC/Genesis/SNES architectures were and how that affected games of the era. There is a fair amount of first-person information from programmers working on each port which is very rare to see
posted by JZig at 11:15 PM on December 23, 2021

Third article is up on the title screen graphics.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:45 AM on December 24, 2021

Make sure to read the second part of the Another World article to read about Rebecca Heineman translating 68k code line-by-line to the 65C816 for the SNES.
posted by credulous at 8:51 AM on December 24, 2021