Mega Man Is on Neo Geo. The Cartridge Has No Idea.

Once SVC Zero could stand inside CPS‑2 Marvel vs. Capcom, the better question ran in reverse: can MvC Mega Man cross into the Neo Geo game that once rebuilt Capcom's roster?

Mega Man now appears in hidden Zero's SVC slot with his real CPS‑2 body frames. He is bright, opaque, display-corrected, and faces his opponent. A source-behavior bridge recognizes Mega Man motions, advances his source roots and boxes, normalizes damage to SVC's 225-life scale, and gates supers on the Neo Geo meter. It is also intentionally uncomfortable evidence: the cartridge ROM is unchanged, the HUD still says ZERO, several grounded moves expose attack boxes without connecting, and effects and sound are still not Mega Man-native.

August 6 inspection: what “full animation” means here

The bridge inventory has 30 visible action families: neutral movement, 18 normal families, two special parent-body families, and three hyper parent-body families. That number is not the same as a complete fighter. The current core chooses one of those families from controller history, draws an external RGBA sequence over hidden Zero, and writes temporary roots, boxes, damage, and meter values. SVC's cartridge still owns the underlying character state.

Mega Man also has gameplay branches missing from the 30-family bridge. In MvC, kicks after Weapon Change select Mega Ball, Tornado Hold, or Leaf Shield; those item/helper paths are documented in the Mega Man move reference and are absent here. Block, hit, dizzy/stun, knockdown, throws, intros, wins, KO, cross-up facing, and recovery require the same state-level treatment. The reciprocal experiment is therefore a visualization and measurement scaffold, not Mega Man playing natively in SVC.

Blueprint: build the same house in the opposite climate

The return trip follows the same construction order as the Zero experiment:

1. Blueprint: define source ownership and pass/fail gates.
2. Foundation: trace Mega Man's real CPS‑2 records and SVC's target object.
3. Framing: correct color, facing, X geometry, anchors, and alpha.
4. Wiring: map inputs, state timelines, roots, boxes, damage, and meter.
5. Plumbing: rebuild helpers, projectiles, effects, and YM2610 audio.
6. Inspection: automate contacts, reversals, both facings, screenshots, and video.
7. Finish: write native C/P/V/M data and replace every ZERO identity surface.

So are Mega Man's normals, dashes, specials, and supers functional? The dash and animation routes are present. Attack boxes appear for every family. Only a subset connects. The latest fixture records air LP, air LK, and the three hyper demonstrations; it records no grounded normal, Mega Buster, or Rising Special contact. That is a prototype with useful evidence, not full gameplay.

Foundation: trace the source character instead of guessing from a sheet

Mega Man's MvC fighter id is $20, his animation tree begins at $156BE0, and his body palette pointer is $1C8F84. Following the actual runtime records yields 206 visual frames across 30 action families. The bridge also stores the matching source root and collision rows rather than asking hidden Zero to improvise Mega Man's movement.

Framing: fix the darkness, the translucency myth, direction, and width

Mega Man looked almost black in the first SVC capture. The pixels were not translucent. The extractor used the lower 12-bit RGB ramp from ROM while its runtime brightness nibble was zero. MvC copies the row to live palette RAM with brightness F; matching the live row restores the full blue ramp. Every visible bridge pixel has alpha 255 and is written directly—no blending.

Facing was a separate sign error. The first renderer inverted Neo Geo's horizontal flag and made P1 look away from P2. It now follows the live body facing and mirrors both pixels and command directions consistently.

Finally, MvC's 384×224 source and Neo Geo's 320×224 source target the same 4:3 display. Mega Man's X coordinates are scaled 5:6, Y is unchanged, and nearest-neighbor sampling preserves pixel edges. Without that correction he appears about 20% too wide.

Wiring: teach SVC to hear Mega Man's commands

The Neo Geo panel has four attack buttons, so the bridge treats A/C as two punch strengths and B/D as two kick strengths. It samples once per emulated frame, keeps a short direction history, mirrors motions by facing, and latches a source action long enough to render its complete timeline.

The data shows why copying Zero's damage table would be wrong. Mega Man has six normal strengths, charged/projectile behavior, and hyper totals that do not map cleanly onto four SVC buttons. The bridge normalizes life percentage, but a native port must also reproduce hit count, scaling, hitstop, pushback, knockdown, cancel windows, meter behavior, and defensive reactions. Its source box rows are useful research data; because the custom core writes them over hidden Zero at runtime, they are not proof that SVC's P-ROM attack and hit-response machinery has been ported.

Plumbing: the prototype still borrows its pipes

The bridge packs 5,897,200 bytes because RGBA is convenient for inspection; it is not Neo Geo's native 4bpp C-ROM format. A cartridge build must quantize palettes, slice tiles, author sprite maps and animation records, allocate protected C-ROM space, patch P-ROM dispatch, replace HUD/select identity, and route audio through the Z80 and YM2610 sample ROMs.

Sound is the clearest unfinished pipe. The current SVC round still uses donor cues. Mega Man's QSound samples have not been converted, placed in V-ROM space, commanded by SVC's Z80, or balanced against YM2610 playback. A video with music is not evidence that Mega Man's sound was imported.

The same boundary explains the reported slow and strange motion. Visual durations are latched by the bridge while the hidden SVC Zero object continues under a different native timeline. Until the P-ROM owns Mega Man's complete state graph, a display sequence can finish late, root motion can disagree with the target object, and an incoming hit can reveal Zero's response behavior.

Inspection: use real emulator pixels, including the donor evidence

The HUD still says ZERO. That is not cropped out because it is useful: it exposes the difference between roster identity, visible body, state logic, and sound. The OG card follows the site's own dark instrument-panel style, uses these emulator pixels, and labels the physical route CPS‑2 B-board → Neo Geo MVS instead of inventing a glossy crossover illustration.

The graphs use a disciplined exhibit grammar: state the conclusion in the title, label marks directly, highlight one comparison, and disclose the method beneath the figure. Here, that method note prevents “has attack boxes” from silently becoming “plays correctly.”

Final inspection punch list

• Convert Mega Man frames into native Neo Geo palette rows, tiles, sprite maps, and protected C-ROM data.
• Author native SVC animation/state records instead of selecting an external renderer action.
• Import Mega Man guard, hit, stun, knockdown, throw, intro, win, and KO families and route them from P-ROM state transitions.
• Fix grounded contact geometry and prove every normal at stand/crouch/air/block fixtures.
• Import Mega Buster and hyper helper objects, not only the parent body timeline.
• Rebuild Weapon Change plus Mega Ball, Tornado Hold, and Leaf Shield child-object branches.
• Reproduce velocity, jump arcs, hitstop, pushback, knockdown, cancels, defense, guard, and meter.
• Replace ZERO in the HUD, select preview, portraits, palettes, intro, win, continue, and ending.
• Port QSound voice/effects into the Neo Geo Z80/YM2610 command and sample pipeline.
• Run both facings and cross-ups, then record public footage only from passing builds.

The return trip has a solid blueprint, a visible frame, and enough temporary wiring to measure the hard parts. The native Neo Geo house is still at the framing stage: 30 displayed action families, zero imported response families, zero native ROM ownership layers, and zero Mega Man audio commands. That boundary—not the screenshot—is the real result: it reveals exactly how much engineering is hidden inside the word “character.”