I got the chance to play the iPhone version of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior and i have to say, it’s surprisingly good. Of course it’s nowhere near arcade-perfect, but Capcom Mobile did get a lot of details right. It’s not too hard to adapt to the touchscreen controls, although the ceiling is pretty low – nobody’s going to bust out TZW combos on the bus anytime soon.

Anyway, here are few minor things i happened to notice:

  • There are no middle attacks in the default control scheme, but it turns out you can change the button layout via “Control Settings” in the Pause menu.

  • In the Help menu, all the special moves have weird names. Oldschool reference?

  • Each character has a predetermined “Shortcut” macro assigned to the SP button. Charge characters actually charge for two seconds and then perform the special move, making it utterly useless for all practical purposes.

  • Button mash macros simply turbo-fire the designated attack for about a second. In Blanka’s case, he whiffs a jab and then performs LP Thunder Storm. If the jab connects, the command executes fast enough to cancel the jab.

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Back in the day, arcade and console hardware ran at weird native resolutions like 384×224. When they were hooked up to a standard arcade monitor, the picture was automatically resized to standard 4:3 resolution.

We assume that the game designers intended their sprites to be viewed at 4:3 resolution. There’s no real debate here because Capcom and other companies used to manufacture complete arcade cabinets, so they knew the end result would be displayed at 4:3.

As a result, when you go from standard resolution to native resolution on an emulator, all the characters look short and wide. The whole screen looks stretched because 384×224 is actually 12:7 resolution. That’s a messed up ratio that doesn’t make sense at all.

However, the main advantage to native resolution is that it represents every pixel. So for archival purposes, sometimes it’s better to store screenshots at native resolution because it’s easy to stretch that image to 4:3 later. On the other hand, there’s no way to go back from 4:3 to native resolution because you can’t tell what the original pixels were when you look at a resampled 4:3 image. Resizing aspect ratios is inherely lossy.

But then again, compressed video is lossy too. If you’re going to show a video to a general audience, it’s usually better to go with the intended 4:3 ratio. That’s how everyone played it so that’s what looks natural and familiar to everyone.

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