OK, so you’re all probably out there chuckling to yourselves each time I talk about messing around with the MAME source code to get the music and sprites out of SFII. Well, your little joke is over. I found the “Self Test” menu.

I’ll probably do nicer versions of the MP3s in a few days. But, even with the power of “Self Test”, and understanding how the graphics are stored in the ROM, getting at the sprites is difficult. It turns out that to save space the fine folks at Capcom split up all the graphics into 8×8 pixel squares, and then reused them wherever they could. For some of the characters, all the squares for a particular frame are stored together and are easy to grab. But for others, they’re spread all throughout memory wherever they can fit in. Somewhere I suppose there’s a table that says which squares you use to paint each frame of each guy, but I’m not about to go find it.

But one mystery I always wondered about is solved: When Chun-Li jumps, she does a flip and her feet disappear off the top of the screen. I was always curious if they bothered to draw her feet, even though they are never shown.

They did.