Ranma 1/2: Chougi Ranbu Hen is a good fighting game close to SF2 but with one big flaw: Its framerate is catastrophic. The game is calibrated for 60 fps but can never reach it even if you don’t touch the controller and leave the fighters idling. It varies continuously between 30 and 50 fps. With the way games used to work, this means that Ranma runs in slow motion all the time.
The other consequences are a degraded input lag and that the game also has very bad frame pacing because the duration of the frames themselves is very variable. It can vary from 1 to 4.
The hack consists of optimizing the code of the most expensive tasks (this is not a SA1 or FastROM hack). This goes from sprite management to collision management, including input management and sound effects, plus a few other little things.
The result is a game that now runs with a rock stable 60 fps framerate. This means that the game’s frames are now updated with every screen scan even in the most intense situations whereas in the original game some frames required up to 4 scans before being updated.
There is no longer any frame drop. It completely changes the pacing of the game. The input lag is also improved and the frame pacing is now perfect.
Another fun side effect is that the timer now runs at the correct speed (99 seconds is exactly 99 seconds now, unlike the original game).
But this is not just a framerate improvement patch. It’s a double patch that also fixes a lot of collision bugs from the original game to have a cleaner game. I detail all the collision changes in a google doc (the link in the video or the readme) for pro players of the game who would like to know exactly what changes on this subject.
This patch (since version 1.3) is compatible with the Dynamic-Design’s translation patch V1.10 but it must be applied before the translation patch.
CRC-32: c552b1f
SHA-1: 3754284f915c5e7281e1412b932b7ba876f05348
An impressive achievement – thanks for your hard work.
Thanks you!
The amount of detail and knowledge you have to have learned about this game to do what you did is astounding.
I’ll be watching your work with great interest 😀
Thanks!