Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo just got a Commodore 64 port

A playable, fan-made port of Capcom's Super Street Fighter II Turbo is now available to download for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128, but it is still a work in progress with some backdrops and music yet to be completed. The fan-made release includes a fully playable .crt ROM file and a dedicated PDF manual.

I am honestly amazed at how well this looks and runs. Seeing Ryu and Ken trade fireballs on an 8-bit microcomputer from the early 1980s breaks my brain a little bit. In many ways, this homebrew port seems better than Fighting Street on the TurboGrafx-16. The music sounds amazing on the SID chip!

Capcom originally released Super Street Fighter II Turbo in arcades on February 23, 1994. It was the fifth major iteration of the Street Fighter II sub-series. The game introduced the Super Combo system and added Akuma as a hidden boss character. It ran on the CP System II arcade board, which used a 16-MHz processor and dedicated graphics hardware capable of pushing hundreds of large sprites at once. Capcom ported the game to the 3DO, Amiga, and MS-DOS shortly after the arcade release. It eventually made its way to the Dreamcast, Game Boy Advance, and modern platforms.

The Commodore 64 launched in 1982 with a 1-MHz processor and 64 kilobytes of RAM. The hardware gap between the two machines is massive. Official fighting game ports for 8-bit microcomputers were notoriously terrible. Companies usually stripped out most of the animation frames, reduced the characters to flickering stick figures, and mapped the six-button control scheme to a single joystick button with awkward directional taps.

A two-megabyte cartridge

This new port bypasses many of the Commodore 64's limitations by using a larger cartridge format. The .crt file is nearly two megabytes in size. That extra storage space allows the developer to pack in recognizable voice samples, stage music, and a surprising amount of animation data. The characters are easily identifiable. The hitboxes appear to function exactly how you would expect them to in a proper Street Fighter game.

The game includes the complete roster. You can select all the original world warriors, the four boss characters, and the four new challengers introduced in Super Street Fighter II. The speed of the game is particularly impressive. It maintains a fast, fluid pace during complex special moves. The port also natively supports the Commodore 128. Booting it on the C128 takes advantage of the system's faster 2-MHz processor mode to eliminate slowdown during heavy action.

Beating the TurboGrafx-16

My comparison to Fighting Street is not a joke. NEC and Hudson Soft released that official port of the original Street Fighter for the PC Engine CD-ROM in 1988 (and later the TurboGrafx-CD in North America). Despite running on vastly superior hardware with the benefit of CD audio, Fighting Street is a sluggish, unresponsive mess with terrible collision detection. Don't get me wrong. I love Fighting Street!

I haven't played this Commodore 64 port of a SFII. But it looks like it plays like a modern fighting game. It seems like the developer managed to translate the core timing of a 1994 competitive arcade staple to a computer that was designed before the Nintendo Entertainment System even existed.