Support NeoGAF

[IbizaPocholo]

A closer look at how Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the Game Boy Advance fit into a single 32 Megabit GBA Cartridge.

 

[Isleofsancroy]

I mean they shoved 3D Mortal Kombat and 3D Tekken into a GBA cart too. Even has a decent port of Doom (but not advanced enough for Ultima Underworld). It's really not that surprising they could fit SFA in a single cart. Not that I recall there being any multi-cart GBA games.

 

[yurinka]

The original arcade version rom is 44.2MB (354 Megabit). But it featured a bigger resolution, way more animation frames, bigger sprites with more colors, higher quality music and sound effects but less characters, stages and game modes.

They did a great job. Great video btw, thanks for sharing.

 

[bender]

 

[fart town usa]

I like that guys channel. I wonder if that game is available on the Wii U eShop? They got a lot of Capcom games on there and I feel like I've seen that one.

On a sidenote, Street Fighter Alpha 2 on the SNES is pretty impressive as well. Music took a huge hit but the character models are pretty impressive. Backgrounds took a hit but Charlie's is cool with the jet hovering in the background. Comparing the Saturn version to the SNES version is pretty neat. Fantastic game.

 

[CamHostage]

I mean they shoved 3D Mortal Kombat and 3D Tekken into a GBA cart too.

Yes, but when we're talking "managed to fit on a single GBA cart", that's a little different from having the the technical firepower to make amazing 3D engines on the meager hardware. We're specifically talking about fitting a huge amount of art (sprites and backgrounds) into the limited storage space of a cartridge (and live game RAM, sometimes, if the game has a lot of imagery at a high framerate.)

3D Mortal Kombat and Tekken were also not exactly 3D games. They were complex "2.5D" games, you might say, with a Mode-7 style floor that moved under the fighters and in/out/around in perspective, a wrap-around background image image (or actually two backgrounds, for parallax effect,) and then the characters were 2D sprites rendered with the ACM method. Those sprites had limited frames of animation compared to Alpha 3 and were also fairly optimized by the computer rendering in color/resolution (although I don't think GBA could have really taken advantage of image compression?), so I would guess they're actually not using as much data as a comparative SFA4 character?

That said, the complete package of movement and zooming and perspective orientation and effects and movesets added up to some worth equally worth celebrating in Tekken GBA and MK: DA GBA, if you're a fan of GBA development heroes.