Update #3 (Tue 16th Jan, 2024 12:15 GMT): The Mega Final Fight January 2024 build is now available to those who support Mauro Xavier's Patreon, and is shown in action above.
This update now allows you to play up to the end of Stage 3, which ends in a boss battle with Edi. E. Also included is the ability to select your starting stage. There's also a new Time Attack mode, while a new stage has been added to the existing Survival mode stage: Andore’s Cage.
Xavier has also done a lot of work fixing the slowdown in this version and spent ten days combing through the code to find out what was causing the "cumulative slowdown" that plagued the previous version. While the game still exhibits some sluggishness if you play from Stage 1 all the way to Stage 3, it's smoother than the previous build. Using the level select allows you to play Stage 3 without the slowdown building up and becoming an issue. Hopefully, Xavier can continue to work on this aspect of the game before its final release.
The public release will take place in the next week or so, but it won't include many of the bonus features seen in this Patreon build. You'll need to subscribe to Xavier's Patreon to get those.
Update #2 (Mon 1st Jan, 2024 13:45 GMT): Looks like we'll be getting a new version of the Mega Final Fight demo soon, which will incorporate the first three stages of the game:
Update #1 (Sun 25th Dec, 2022 19:45 GMT): The demo is now available:
Update (Tue 20th Dec, 2022 14:30 GMT): The developer of Mega Final Fight, Mauro Xavier, has tweeted more information about when people will finally get to play a ROM demo.
On Twitter, he announced earlier today that Patreon backers will be able to play the game on December 21st. A public demo will then be available from the 25th December. As Xavier explains, the public demo will likely see some extra polishing from the Patreon one, as he is doing more work on it every day.
Original article (Wed 3rd Aug, 2022 12:35 BST): When it comes to the beat 'em up genre, there are few games as revered as Final Fight. Capcom's arcade brawler, which originally came out in the arcades back in 1989, was a jewel in the SNES's crown, never making the trip over to the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. As a result, Sega fans had to wait an additional four years to experience the game at home, which is when it was finally released for the Mega-CD.
Thirty years have passed since then, and a group of Sega fans has got together to correct this mistake with an incredible, new homebrew project called Mega Final Fight (previously known as Final Fight Ultimate).
This is the passion project of the Brazilian developer Mauro Xavier who is hoping to provide players with the definitive 16-bit console experience on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.
"How this came about is Master Linkuei saw my port to Color Maximite 2 and asked me if I could port it to Mega Drive," says Xavier. "So I accepted the challenge and we got together to do it. Edmo Caldas also joined to recompose the music and so we formed the software house CFX.
"[The truth is] I've always liked Final Fight, in addition to enjoying a good challenge, so I think the biggest reason for us making this port was to develop a game I like and at the same time learn more about the Mega Drive and SGDK programming."
From the progress we've seen so far, on things like Twitter and on YouTube, it looks absolutely incredible. The new version not only boasts superior visuals to the SNES version, but also features a number of additional modes (like Ultimate, boss rush, survival, and time attack), grungy rearrangements of the original game's music, and two new fighters.
This is in addition to some brand-new moves and the ability to play with up to three friends. All of these changes haven't been without their challenges.
"I had no problems with the RAM, even with only 64Kb," says Xavier. "However, with VRAM, the situation is complicated, as it is where the sprites, tiles, and other graphic components are stored.
"The VRAM is also 64Kb but is easily filled when we are trying to display large sprites with very detailed scenarios, so this forces us to stream the sprites directly from ROM to VRAM, often using DMA (direct memory access)... It is a constant cyclical situation where everything has to be well planned to avoid risks of instability."
Early on, for instance, Xavier kept encountering errors and crashes, but after taking the time to learn more about the system architecture he was able to avoid these situations with careful planning and a lot of testing.
Despite these road bumps, Xavier tells us that development on the game is currently progressing well, with the engine now ready to go. There is still some work that needs to be done, which includes creating extra frames for some of the new moves in Ultimate mode, adding details to the additional characters, and implementing some improvements to the stage graphics. But now he's confident about its future.
As for how the game will be distributed, that's a little less sure at the minute. Xavier would love to release an official cartridge but that would involve speaking to Capcom to come to some arrangement. He has said on Twitter, however, that he does plan to release the non-profit fangame as a ROM no matter what. If you want to go support Xavier and the team, you can do so over on his Twitter.