A missing character. A bad pointer. A convincing citation with the wrong evidence. These are the builds, failures, and fixes behind them.
68 published articles · archive $43
Startup, active, recovery and frame advantage for every MvC1 ground normal, each character's command list with its specials and hypers measured, walk and jump values, and the damage formula. Measured in a running game, checked against the ROM's own tables, and downloadable as CSV and JSON.
Every character in DHC v12 ships with 9 colors: the 6 attack buttons (LP, MP, HP, LK, MK, HK) plus 3 Start-button colors. Pick the better of two colors as many times as you like, and make a color of your own for the vote.
Unofficial SF3 TAG V4.3 preview: matched before/after repairs for bugs shown in Justin Wong’s review, a held post-winner report, chosen CPU teams and explicit Party assistance. Install from your own clean game with paced Fightcade and RetroArch guides.
One fighter per side, first-to-two rounds, restored Infinity Gems from Marvel Super Heroes and playable Tomichin. Install from your own clean archives.
Strider Hiryu from Marvel vs. Capcom is playable in arcade Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, in the select-screen square that only showed a logo. His MvC code, sprites, sounds, three hypers and ending come out of your own mvsc.zip. One installer for the Euro set Fightcade plays and the USA set.
XMvsSF 3v3 + DHC v1.1 makes arcade X-Men vs. Street Fighter (1996) three on three, in the style of Marvel vs. Capcom 2: three picks per side in eighteen colours, MP+MK and MP+HK tags to either reserve, Delayed Hyper Combos up to three Hypers long where the motion you enter picks each Hyper, snapbacks that choose who you fight next, CPU teams of three up to Apocalypse, six players with one controller per character, and an optional 512×224 arena. 17,632 bytes of new 68000 code and 89 hooks, with a RetroArch core of its own for Windows, Linux and macOS on Apple silicon, and a two-player preview for Fightcade's own FinalBurn Neo.
MSH TAG makes arcade Marvel Super Heroes (1995) a two-on-two tag game in the style of Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite: two picks per side in six colors each, HP+HK tags that carry a combo, Counter Switch out of a combo, crossover counters, push blocks, snapbacks that knock the point off the screen, double teams under Marvel vs. Capcom's meteor sky, team supers and hyper tags, two same-size life bars and both heroes' faces per side, red life that heals on the bench, a TIME bar along the bottom in double teams, KO hand-offs, CPU teams, and four players in RetroArch. 24,252 bytes of new 68000 code and 101 guarded program replacements in v1.2, one installer for the 951024 sets.
A ROM-free development patch for Super Turbo: clearer tag handoffs and a true 384-to-512 expanded view. Two-player install guides, Apple Silicon/macOS 26+ S06 core, and four-player status.
XCOTA TAG V5.6 repairs Gambit crouching combos and low attacks, Rogue guard recognition, the reproduced Marrow reset and Gambit KO voice, while retaining the original arcade menu.
Four humans, four fighters, one CPS-2 board — plus MVC1's Duo, with its pose and fly-in, for X-Men vs. Street Fighter and MSHvsSF, under MVC1's meteor sky with MVC1's ∞ meter. Five patches with drag-and-drop installers for your own ROM (MSHvsSF's for both its USA and Euro sets), each with its tested scope stated.
The American Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter fills one select-screen box with its own logo. It now holds Strider Hiryu — portrait, name plate, bust and standing figure. Getting there meant retracting three confident answers, including one that blamed the graphics ROMs for a crash caused by a bad pointer.
The US version of Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter hides Norimaro behind one region-default byte. On a fresh EEPROM initialization it makes him selectable and playable; a carried-over EEPROM overrides it.
Hayato's historical v0 render probe runs on Hulk's code. The current native import is partial and diagnostic-only: a 654-byte static bundle passes static/CPU checks, but no target candidate or new Mac/MAME runtime exists.
Sentinel's render probe still runs on Hulk's code. A later pinned audibility run was blocked: 24 source clips decoded, 11 mapped and seated across 42 aux12 events, but no audio was heard and no candidate exists.
Which MvC supers are mashable, what to press, and how many hits were demonstrated: character verdicts, baseline comparisons, code limits, reproducible evidence and a CPS-2 chip location map.
DHC v8 is out. The partner handoff's missing background was a stalled Hyper script waiting for an animation event nobody sent; six bytes send it. Level 4 of the meter turns yellow from a tile the game already had. What was verified, at what tier, and the trailer.
The cap is one byte. Four other tables also assume three. A statically verified five-level patch uses Capcom's existing art; a full-match play test is still pending.
Old write-ups made unfinished ports sound ready. I built a read-only MCP server with 21 tools to retrieve the current evidence without granting permission to run or publish.
I wanted to play as the helper I always picked. Rogue took Hulk's slot, but borrowed machinery still blocks a finished fighter—and the download stays withheld.
An interactive CPS-2 palette workshop: keep the button index, follow every reader, measure existing ROM space, and build complete color banks without expanding the game.
MvC's own rank table explains the difference. I built a training tool to read those rules live; the code passes headless checks, with a real Fightcade smoke test still ahead.
Lightning Storm lands ten hits. Magneto runs seven gameplay segments. The footage is real; diagnostic setup and unfinished parity keep it from being a release claim.
DHC v11: eighteen color choices, six native match-report pages and focused DHC repairs. Classic/REMIX, three bars, original artwork and labeled historical videos remain. ROM-free community release with explicit native-test limits.
That is Dreamcast MvC2's measured texture budget. The decoded stage format and conversion plan show what must be cut; a converted stage has not booted yet.
A 90-second control killed the theory. Following the renderer instead produced permanent Storm and Magneto icons in a 2,736-byte MvC ROM patch.
The stock counter really saturates; it isn't hiding extra hits. A separate display counter reaches 999 while the gameplay counter and ROM size stay unchanged.
Storm needs 12,329 tiles. Jin frees 12,873. That 544-slot margin is the difference between a stock-size plan and another expansion—and only the start of the audit.
The 1998 select screen rendered 20 visible boxes in an instrumented proof. The current ten-table, 2,018-byte relocation is a non-emitting plan; no new character ID is installed or enabled.
Five fighters passed the editor checks. That did not prove they could fight. The gates that catch wrong builds, misleading screenshots, and missing move behavior.
Left and right can flip the fifth hit's launch—until geometry and the corner win. A stock-ROM experiment explains the rule, and why Zangief's 360 is different.
Mega Optic Blast is now a two-level air super in MvC. Making the stolen beam playable meant fixing its input, palette, damage, and the landing after the light goes out.
His fight tree and Captain America's editor tree told different stories. The missing-animation mystery, the real tile bill, and a gameplay reel that still isn't full parity.
The ending says YOU GOT MAGNETIC SHOCKWAVE. The arcade game never lets you use it. I restored the PlayStation-only reward with Onslaught's own arcade attack.
He appears in SVC Chaos through a custom emulator bridge, with source frames and attack experiments. The ROM, reactions, helpers, and sound still belong to Zero.
Zero's face and name are in Marvel vs. Capcom. Underneath, Mega Man still owns most of the machinery. The crossover prototype exposes what a sprite swap cannot fix.
A Mega Crash-style burst and a hold-to-parry prototype share one damage hook. Finding it exposed a trusted harness that had read the wrong memory for months.
This part has been merged into the single full write up, which carries it forward to the current state of the project.
Ken's sprites run inside Marvel vs. Capcom. The animation tables were the trap: 35 visual routes are now authored, but his Hadouken still throws Gambit's card.
This part has been merged into the single full write up, which carries it forward to the current state of the project.
Cable's historical Ryu-slot v33 build ran in MvC1, but that donor lineage is retired. The current native-$32 branch is a structural-only v17 head with all 52 gameplay lanes still open.
An average Dreamcast MvC character is larger than a Saturn's total memory, expansion cart included. The supposedly easy port fails before the first line of code.
A native import needed more space than the game's fragmented gaps could supply. Four emulator changes opened a contiguous megabyte—offline, beyond stock hardware.
Retail CPS-2 ROMs still contain Capcom's HIT, CATCH, AI, and art tools. I automated the hidden lab—and made it reject character ports that only look finished.
Claude agents built an entire working subsystem for the wrong explanation. The real fix was two bytes. How I decide which AI-generated evidence deserves to survive.
A false compression diagnosis nearly sent the port into weeks of codec work. Fixing the read exposed 11,587 tiles and a path to running his real code in MvC.
The street and subway render inside the wrong game. A character bug froze the fight, a second bug moved the underground into the sky, and some art still won't fit.
All 57,370 sprite records round-trip exactly, and character tables match the arcade byte for byte. Four wrong answers later, a running match settled the animation tree.
The game had 23 character slots. Dark Sakura and Shuma-Gorath run beyond them, with their own code—and every table past the old limit waiting to break something.
The HUD decoded every button wrong, an anti-air hid behind if False, and the policy lost control of most frames. A historical audit of the bugs around the model.
Borrowing Ryu's state machine made Dark Sakura fight in MvC1. It also trapped her in his rules. The playable shortcut I retired before building the native port.
One more prompt should not erase a human correction. The artifact IDs, revision checks, and approval rules an impressive AI demo tends to leave out.
A prettier answer can hide a worse production system. Compare against the model you already run, inspect the failures, and make the judge prove itself too.
A manual's storage limit becomes an operating limit, with a perfect footnote. Why real quotes and valid schemas still aren't proof.
A growing catalog turns similar tools into a selection trap. Search first, fetch one schema, and test what the smaller prompt still gets wrong.
The agent picks the wrong tool, a real citation supports a false claim, and the next prompt erases your edit. Four failure stories and one MCP system built in the arcade lab.
Thousands of replay records held his habits. The six-checkpoint diagnostic is complete, but schema12 remains non-training, the action legend is unverified, and no current checkpoint is promoted as Alan-like.
Three table formats, a 13-state selector, and a 116-byte interrupt hook. Why adding one secret character became an engine investigation—and why the plan changed.
An unused character ID leads to four guarded load paths. The trail looked like a missing fighter; the later audit showed why it wasn't a ready-made slot.
Bigger ROM files fooled the diagnostics. Making the extra graphics visible took a custom emulator mapper—and cost standard Fightcade compatibility.
Secret developer tools, unused character routes, stolen boss attacks, and fighters in games they never shipped in. The complete CPS-2 research trail, including the dead ends.
A diagnostic menu painted garbage no amount of memory clearing could fix. The text renderer was still drawing because nobody had told it to stop.
Five tracks, 122 audio banks, and a custom FBNeo core made the sound-test demo possible—after a signed integer turned the soundtrack into a speedrun.
A friend's fighting style, characters stranded in the wrong game, and tools that catch my own bad conclusions. Start with the projects that made me keep going.
A design for turning FBNeo into a fighting-game lab: Metal rendering, live debugging, and parallel AI training on Apple Silicon. The architecture before the benchmark.
Six directional codes, their exact byte patterns, and the character IDs behind them—including the unused number that sent the investigation sideways.
A near-zero tile match looked like incompatible artwork. Reproducible ROM analysis exposed the bad assumption—and made the correction testable.
A two-byte search exposed three hidden-character table formats—and a hardcoded position check that kept the selector away from the new entry.
An abandoned Armored Spider-Man experiment found a way around the selector: ROM injection, palette writes, and a VBlank hook the state machine never expected.