So I played as Seth and Gouken in vanilla arcade

Classic Fighting Games Street Fighter IV
1

…through the magic of the TypeX Loader and a memory editor.

MAJOR DISCOVERY: See Rival Battles sections.

At first, I was having tons of problems, and still have one major one, though I don’t know how I can avoid it short of a either new video card (and no, I love my Radeon, thank you) or putting on a different OS.

First things first. The game feels very weird coming from PC version. It might be Joy2Key, but I’ve never had so many EX DP motions coming out when I’m going for Ultra.

The AI on default settings is garbage. Much worse than even console on Medium. Meeting the requirements for the Gouken fight is cake, especially when you come up against Zangief. He loves Running Bear Grab, which is huge punish bait when he comes from full screen.

Second, Seth and Gouken are horribly underdeveloped. They put in enough to show the one color, and only placeholder files for Color 2, although hacking copies of the first color’s files and adding the proper textures works, and averts crashes.

Third, despite the incompleteness, the game is very expansion-friendly. Once proper extra colors were given to these two, they displayed just fine, and even ending movies put in from PC version play at the right time (yes, even for BOS and GKN)… or at least they try to on my system. Because of the problem mentioned before, they crash at the first frame, casualties of Direct3D changes between XP (the X²’s OS) and Vista/7 (my OS). If this were not a problem, I can easily see the game working well even with this injected content.

Character notes:

Seth:

[LIST]
[]Is boss version, even when playing as him. It’s very easy to see why Capcom nerfed his health and damage output like they did; otherwise, he’d be banned instantly.
[]All commands work. Home version players would feel right at home with him.
[]Rival Battle is against Abel in Training Stage. It shows as: Dot in the top-left corner, Secret Laboratory as the preview icon, blank name field.
[]Unmodified, the Color 2 file contains Ryu textures. This does not cause a crash, but makes the second Seth in a mirror match look untextured, but shaded. I’ll probably need some PC modders to assist with making the hacked Color 2 accurate to the console, but for now, I’m satisfied.
[*]When I accessed it the first time, the Gouken battle crashed at the point the characters could move. I now know this was due to the PC version’s CMN file I tried using for him. After replacing it with a fresh copy of the arcade version’s file, this was just fine.
[/LIST]
Gouken:

[LIST]
[]Has all textures for vs. screen use. This includes his ‘flag’, name tag and large image. For being so incomplete, this is a surprising find.
[]All commands implemented, and all combos work as they should, but some moves are different.
[]Rival Battle is against Ryu, also in Training Stage.
[]Normal Senkugoshoha (AKA Palm) has insanely slow recovery. Easy punish on block.
[]EX Palm, however, is as fast as ever.
[]Sweep feels slower. Not as snappy as in home, though this might be part of the arcade version’s funky feeling.
[]Can link cr.LP into cr.MP. (?!?!)
[]Amaoroshi (backthrow) also feels different. It breaks instantly when teched, and feels faster when it connects.
[]Kongoshin (counter) feels like it’s also slower to recover from on whiff.
[]Unmodified, the Color 2 file contains a strange texture I can’t immediately identify. I saved it off before replacing it with a hack of Color 1. This unmodified file is far too different to display, and it does cause a crash when trying to load.
[*]Because of the wholly inappropriate Color 2 file, the Gouken mirror match crashes the game. After replacement, however, the fight went without a hitch. I finished it with the beefy corner combo into Ultra, so I was right at home after maining the old man on PC.
[/LIST]
Just so people don’t think I’m bullshitting them, here’s a screencap taken while I was booted into my XP install:

My next forays into ‘SF4AE improvement’ will likely involve adding in the rest of Seth and Gouken’s color files, and possibly finding a way to add them to the character select screen so I don’t have to monkey around with memory editing and having to play as Sagat for the first match.

I may also try finding some way to give Gouken his console/PC improvements. If I can, I most likely will.

Also, should anyone else have this dumped game and have some extra input, post on up. Do not ask me for links to the loader, the dump, or the modified files. I’m not certain how much of this the mods are cool with, and I’m not going to push the issue. However, if you already have it and want to modify the files yourself, I am willing to teach you.

Maybe this thread can open up modding for the arcade version… I already know one person has put PC mods into the game, running on an actual cabinet, no less. I’d like to see just how much we can improve the game.

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Here’s how to fix Seth and Gouken so that you can have a mirror match.

You’ll need a few things first:
[LIST=1]
[]SF4 Assets Explorer. Any version will work, but I’d recommend .37 as it can open from console files as well.
[]Hex editor. Preferably one with the ability to edit ASCII, as this makes it easier.
[]Seth and Gouken Color 2 textures. This is where having a PC version of SF4 installed comes in handy.
[/LIST]
And the process isn’t much more difficult.
[LIST=1]
[]Copy the Color 1 file (BOS_01_01.col.emz or GKN_01_01.col.emz) to a new folder and rename it to _01_02.col.emz, then move it into the character’s folder. You are free to overwrite the old file as we won’t need it any longer.
[]Open the newly-renamed file in SF4 Assets Explorer. This will decompress the file for hex editing in the next step.
[]Next, use it to open the PC version’s Color 2 file and extract the textures. Remember which texture goes where (Seth has only 1, while Gouken has 4)
[]Open the uncompressed color 2 in your hex editor and go all the way to the end of the file. You will see two strings saying <CHR>_01_01. Change the _01_01 to _01_02 (like we did in renaming). Save the hacked file.
[]Go back into SF4 Assets Explorer and open the arcade version’s Color 2 file, and replace the textures with the ones you extracted. This will create several .bak files in the directory. Leave them until the testing is finished.
[]Start up SF4 arcade, and use memory editing to pick Seth or Gouken with Color 2. If the texture shows up, it’s a success.
[]After having confirmed both characters now work, delete the .bak files created by the Assets Explorer.
[]If you have lots of time and motivation, you can repeat the process for Colors 3 through 10.
[/LIST]
One minor thing to point out is that Seth’s ‘reverse’ color will still be black, even in Color 2. I’m not sure why this is, but I’m not too worried about it. Those with more knowledge and attention to detail than I can figure it out. With any luck, they’ll even share how to do this.

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I’m taking all the original sound files out of Arcade vanilla and implementing them into AE. I want to tinker with this more, like how the name tags are next to health bars, as opposed to console/pc being below the health bar. Pics seem different as well. I like the intro music that plays when the high scores are scrolling, instead of the AE music. PM me and we’ll talk offline.