Street Fighter II′: Rainbow Edition

Street Fighter II′: Rainbow Edition
Street Fighter II′: Rainbow Edition's title screen
Hack of	Street Fighter II′: Champion Edition
Original developer	Capcom
Console	Arcade
Date	1993

Street Fighter II′: Rainbow Edition is a pirated hack of Street Fighter II′: Champion Edition made by an unknown company in 1993. Multiple versions of this game are known to exist.

Overview

Ryu vs Zangief. Note that Zangief has transformed into Sagat.

This game is a hack of Street Fighter II′: Champion Edition, notable for modifying many gameplay aspects, the most noticeable being the ability to transform into other characters and being able to pull off special moves in midair.

Some of the special moves were modified, such as the Hadokens, which can either home in on the opponent or travel extremely fast, as well as 7 different characters being able to execute them as opposed to just Ryu and Ken. Zangief moves noticeably faster in this game, and E. Honda can pull off Hadokens when performing his Hyakuretsu Harite.

The graphics and music are identical to those in the original game aside from the title's logo, which is now rainbow-colored, which is where this hack gets its name from.

Although there are many different revisions of this hack readily dumped and emulated, several versions are still left undumped. The rampant craziness with these hacks and the popularity of arcade distributors putting these hacks in machines was one of the reasons behind the creation of the legitimate Street Fighter II′ Turbo: Hyper Fighting update.

CPS1 Hardware

All of the various relatives of Rainbow Edition (or Black Belt Edition as it is sometimes called) run on the original Street Fighter II′: Champion Edition hardware with only a few alterations. Almost all the EPROM's on the two PCB's that make up the Street Fighter II′: Champion Edition board are socketed chips; they do not require any soldering to remove or replace. Each chip is numbered on the board, and by replacing a certain few chips on the board that contain the particulars of the program code a regular CE board becomes a Rainbow Edition board. Thus, a Rainbow Edition board is not necessarily a pirated or counterfeit board, but rather only has a few non-official components added to it.

After the overwhelming success of such grey-market versions, Capcom themselves developed their own and released Turbo: Hyper Fighting as an upgrade to Champion Edition. Hyper Fighting operates in the same manner, it was distributed as loose numbered EEPROM chips to replace those in certain positions on the CE board. The original version of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior saw a very limited release of hacks on its hardware. This, and other hacks, are widely available on the Internet and have been included in MAME ROM sets for several years.

Trivia

• This game is the reason Street Fighter II′ Turbo: Hyper Fighting exists. A Capcom employee played this game, and while he was unimpressed with the game, he noticed that it was faster than official Street Fighter games, and therefore Hyper Fighting was made.
• The title logo's palette on the widely-known version (as shown on the infobox) is actually from Guile's primary palette data.