Building the Impossible Return Trip: Mega Man Crosses CPS‑2 Into Neo Geo SVC Chaos

After moving SVC Chaos Zero into CPS-2 Marvel vs. Capcom, the more revealing question was the opposite one: can a CPS-2 character cross back into the Neo Geo game that borrowed Capcom's license?

Mega Man now stands inside a live SVC round in hidden Zero's place. His MvC body covers idle, movement, all mapped standing and crouching normal families, two special families, and three hyper presentation families. SVC still owns the round, commands, collision, damage, meter, effects, and sound. The supplied cartridge archive remains unchanged; a custom FBNeo renderer is the temporary wall carrying the imported body.

Blueprint: separate a replacement wall from the foundation

This build follows the same house rule as the Zero port: identify every system before claiming the character. The result is functional because SVC Zero already has complete combat plumbing. Mega Man is currently the visible tenant, not the owner of those pipes.

The direct answer to “are the normals and supers functional?” is therefore two-part. All eight mapped normal routes work, and both of Zero's SVC super families are mechanically verified, with real command recognition, meter consumption, hit logic, damage, effects, and audio. Mega Man-native combat is not yet present. His frames describe what the player sees; they do not replace Zero's attack tables or state handlers.

Foundation: enter through SVC's real door

The bridge uses the game's authentic hidden-Zero selection route rather than forcing a character id after initialization: hold Start, enter Up, Right, Right, Left, Left, Down, Up, Up, Up, Right, then confirm. That matters because selection initializes palettes, object families, HUD state, and other tables a late id write can leave stale.

The source side also begins with data, not a montage. Mega Man's MvC fighter id $20, animation tree $156BE0, and palette pointer $1C8F84 lead to the chains the game truly advances. Following them produces the complete current 151-frame vocabulary.

Framing: fix direction, proportions, and the “translucent” illusion

Three visual bugs could be mistaken for bad source art.

First, the return trip requires the inverse of Zero's transform. MvC's 384×224 source raster is displayed on the same 4:3 cabinet shape as Neo Geo's 320×224 raster. Mega Man is resampled 5:6 in X with nearest-neighbor pixels and no Y change. Copying him one-for-one makes him roughly 20% too wide.

Second, the initial renderer inverted Neo Geo's horizontal flip bit. On the left side of the screen, Mega Man looked away from Guile. The corrected renderer follows the live body attribute directly, so the imported frame faces the same opponent as Zero's suppressed body.

Third, Mega Man looked translucent. An alpha census shows the opposite: there is no partial alpha in the bridge at all. Every visible pixel is fully opaque and written directly; only the background pixels are zero-alpha. The dark MvC palette against SVC's stage—and the wrong-facing silhouette—made the first result read as ghosted.

Wiring: bind MvC animation families to live SVC inputs

The bridge samples the four Neo Geo directions and buttons once per emulated frame. It keeps a short direction history, recognizes the mapped Zero motions, latches the requested MvC body family long enough to complete, and leaves SVC to advance the real combat state. Sampling once matters: the renderer can run more than once per raster frame, and treating each slice as an input sample made quarter-circles appear longer than they were.

The cross-project comparison matters because a donor slot tends to hide truncation. Mega Man's reverse bridge already carries more visible source variation per family than the Zero bridge, yet the Ken reference is almost three times denser again. The correlation is not “more records means a better character”; it is “source depth predicts how quickly stock donor tables stop being enough.”

The super crosswalk deliberately pairs like-sized demonstrations while keeping the mechanics label visible:

The first valid super consumes SVC's only starting stock. The final reel therefore joins two automated, fresh-stock captures: one for Spiral Shot and one for Ultimate Saber. In both takes the gauge visibly falls from Level 1 to Level 0. Nothing writes meter into memory, and the cut is kept visible as a new take rather than disguised as uninterrupted play.

Insulation: understand what the temporary bridge costs

RGBA makes an excellent inspection material because every frame is easy to trace and view, but it is not how Neo Geo stores a fighter. The 2.64 MiB body asset is dominated by normal and movement canvases, not by the 14 added hyper frames.

A native cartridge build must replace this inspection wall with Neo Geo materials: choose 15-color palette rows, pack 4bpp tiles, author sprite maps, allocate C-ROM space, encode the protected late Neo Geo graphics format, write SVC animation/state records, and rebuild the identity surfaces. The current svc.zip is unchanged, which is an important boundary rather than a packaging detail.

Inspection: the repaired return trip in stills

The HUD still says ZERO. Cropping it away would make the result less informative. It proves that roster identity, body presentation, animation selection, and combat behavior are separate data layers. The same separation is why the chart design here uses direct ownership labels instead of a single green “done” bar.

The chart grammar follows the conclusion-first, direct-label approach studied in McKinsey's UK FDI exhibits and global FDI report: show the finding in the title, mute context, highlight the important series, and put the unit and method under the visual. These are original site components and arcade measurements, not copied McKinsey artwork.

Punch list: what turns the model home into a cartridge-native fighter

• Quantize Mega Man into Neo Geo palette rows and 4bpp tiles without losing the MvC silhouette.
• Author sprite maps and animation/state records for every required SVC action.
• Replace Zero's HUD name, portrait, select preview, palette choices, win, and continue surfaces.
• Translate Mega Man commands, velocities, boxes, damage, guard, meter, helpers, and all three hypers instead of borrowing Zero's equivalents.
• Allocate and route Mega Man cues through SVC's YM2610 sound program.
• Encode the C-ROM data correctly, run stock-core and regression tests, and publish hashes for the transformed reader-supplied set.

The foundation is still SVC Zero. The frame, visible rooms, and inspection wiring now belong to Mega Man. Turning that model into a native Neo Geo home is the next phase—and the boundary between those phases is precisely what makes the reverse experiment useful.