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Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition for SEGA Genesis

RoboFu

One of the green rats
This is the absolute coolest ( I do not even know if you could call it a hack? ) thing ... I have seen in the home brew community in a long time and that is saying something. While not super new it has been updated a few times over the years.

So what is it?

Back when Mortal Kombat was released on the SEGA Genesis / Megadrive it seemed to a lot of people that it just wasn't as good as it could be. There was a few reasons for that. One the time frame was very short to get it out and two the publisher cheapened out on the Genesis cart and the devs were stuck with smaller storage than what was needed. Because of that a lot of corners had to be cut. missing animations, missing sounds, missing graphics and horribly compressed sounds at that.

Arcade Edition sought to rectify that and eventually become a major over haul of the classic port improving on everything. The Video posted below goes into more detail, but it is a lot more than just a quick face lift.

It runs on real consoles and shows that it wasn't always about the ability of the hardware as time and budget played a large role as well.

I do hope to see more projects like this in the future as I am always playing my old consoles and love all the new games and updates being released.


Arcade:
maxresdefault.jpg


Genesis Arcade Edition on the left vs original on right:
TL5kRdy.jpeg


 

Saber

Member
Is nothing new per say(already knew since DF episode about it) but is actually a pretty cool project. Make you think about the overall limitations back at time.
 

Sethbacca

Member
Semi relevant, but worth a watch. The dudes putting these arcade games together back in the day were basically just teams of feral nerds. It's no wonder home ports were terrible.

 

RAIDEN1

Member
Wasn't there something similar done with Streetfighter 2 on the Genesis? ie improved sound etc? I'd love to see someone or a team do a conversion of Super Streetfighter 2 to the Sega CD, with redbook audio.....if that happened back then it would have boosted sales of the add-on no end..
 

Danknugz

Member
this is awesome but back in the 90s for some reason i really warmed to the SNES MK port, genesis port was fun but didn't have the color range of Snes of course.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
this is awesome but back in the 90s for some reason i really warmed to the SNES MK port, genesis port was fun but didn't have the color range of Snes of course.

Yeah I had both eventually but the snes port in the US played like shit with horrible input lag. Interesting enough it was fixed for the Japanese release. So if you ever wanted to play the snes port again get the super famicom version.
 
I'm not sure if I should make a new thread.... but speaking of Mortal Kombat home brew ports... there are two that I have been following for months... These two projects almost started at the same time...

The first one is a port of Mortal Kombat 1 for the Atari Jaguar. The sprites for this port are not arcade 1:1, due to the cartridge ROM size, but they still larger in resolution than any of the 16bit home ports, but still lower in resolution compared to the arcade sprites. But the port itself is really impressive and is based on the arcade ROM. It even has some Atari Jaguar exclusive features like a couple new custom characters.




The second port is from a different home brew developer: it is Mortal Kombat II for the 3DO. The dev has a really close to complete port, and is working out bug fixes. It honestly looks about as good as the Saturn and PS1 ports. There were talks of Mortal Kombat II getting ported to the 3DO back in the day. But it never materialized.

 

cireza

Member
I'm not sure if I should make a new thread.... but speaking of Mortal Kombat home brew ports... there are two that I have been following for months... These two projects almost started at the same time...

The first one is a port of Mortal Kombat 1 for the Atari Jaguar. The sprites for this port are not arcade 1:1, due to the cartridge ROM size, but they still larger in resolution than any of the 16bit home ports, but still lower in resolution compared to the arcade sprites. But the port itself is really impressive and is based on the arcade ROM. It even has some Atari Jaguar exclusive features like a couple new custom characters.




The second port is from a different home brew developer: it is Mortal Kombat II for the 3DO. The dev has a really close to complete port, and is working out bug fixes. It honestly looks about as good as the Saturn and PS1 ports. There were talks of Mortal Kombat II getting ported to the 3DO back in the day. But it never materialized.


These guys are doing a pretty great job.
 

SkylineRKR

Member
This MK1 is the version I would've wanted. I knew back then too that the Genesis version was gimped. It did play better than SNES, but it had quite horrible visuals, and no different stances for the ninjas etc.
This one was pretty damned close.

This thread sort of got me thinking about my lost US account. I knew I had this game there, on PS3 (along with others like Sega Rally OA). I managed to change my pw via the chatbot, which bypasses the DoB which I was stuck on (idk but apparently I didn't use my real one), and I downloaded this baby for the first time in probably over 14 years. I give it a whirl later.
 
These guys are doing a pretty great job.

I didn't want to open a new thread, even though both those ports are thread worthy. This thread seems to be related to Mortal Kombat homebrew. Both the MK1 for Atari Jaguar and the MKII 3DO ports are worth keeping an eye on if you are into alternative machines that generally don't get a lot of attention.

The developer of the MK1 Jaguar port actually made a few of his own personal 'enhancements' like improving the blood and gore in the fatalities. The original arcade game was always a bit weak in this area, as the Fatalities were reported as being something that was added much later, and the decapitations always looked like bad cut and paste jobs. Plus he ads his own hidden character called Kasume. Which is based on the 'ninja' sprites.

The MKII port on the 3DO is really fascinating, as it looks pretty faithful to the arcade game. Shang Tsung seems to have no loading between morphs. But that could be because the game is running from flash storage? Apparently an iSO will be made available soon.
 

sn0man

Member
This arcade version for genesis needs a 32X version as well to get the colors to match the arcade. (Really we just need a perfect MK1–4 collection for modern consoles, but on old hardware is very very fun.)
 
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