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Description
Around the time when Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat were at the height of their early popularity, I started thinking about fighting games on the SAM Coupé. Of course, back in those days, I was still pretty clueless about optimised palettes, so I started from the point of view that there should be three 'skintones', then three colours for each character's costume... That accounted for nine of the sixteen available colours, and I figured I'd need black and white, plus a couple of shades of grey for the HUD... which left just three palette slots available for unique background colours. I've no idea why I thought that was ever going to work, and I will be forever grateful to all those pixel artists out there who created optimised 16-colour palettes. The SAM's full range of 128 colours isn't great, but it's able to produce more than adequate interpretations for most of these palettes.

The small character portraits were created using the template I'd set up for IRON, but then shrunk down to fit. I strongly suspect that the sprites would have been too large to be practical on the SAM... They were certainly too large for me to even being to animate them. I did a few frames for maybe two or three characters, and then just gave up as I didn't have the patience for it.

General Deth was a pretty stereotypical military character, and it's possible I was aiming for something like Guile from SFII with him... Mike, if I remember correctly, was inspired by or based upon King from the King of Fighters games... But I'm pretty sure he was intended to be male - I just liked King's dress sense.

Description
Around the time when Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat were at the height of their early popularity, I started thinking about fighting games on the SAM Coupé. Of course, back in those days, I was still pretty clueless about optimised palettes, so I started from the point of view that there should be three 'skintones', then three colours for each character's costume... That accounted for nine of the sixteen available colours, and I figured I'd need black and white, plus a couple of shades of grey for the HUD... which left just three palette slots available for unique background colours. I've no idea why I thought that was ever going to work, and I will be forever grateful to all those pixel artists out there who created optimised 16-colour palettes. The SAM's full range of 128 colours isn't great, but it's able to produce more than adequate interpretations for most of these palettes.

The small character portraits were created using the template I'd set up for IRON, but then shrunk down to fit. I strongly suspect that the sprites would have been too large to be practical on the SAM... They were certainly too large for me to even being to animate them. I did a few frames for maybe two or three characters, and then just gave up as I didn't have the patience for it.

General Deth was a pretty stereotypical military character, and it's possible I was aiming for something like Guile from SFII with him... Mike, if I remember correctly, was inspired by or based upon King from the King of Fighters games... But I'm pretty sure he was intended to be male - I just liked King's dress sense.