Special-Move-Cheat-Writing Theory

[Utopia-Addicted Coffee]

Hi everybody, a new registered user in this forum. First of all: thank you to all those who, around the world, with their programming skill and their passion made the "MAME dream" come true.

There was a time when, after playing with an arcade game some place, my highest expectation and hope (and joy, when it happened) was buying a Commodore 64 version. No more: I got the real games on my IMac's screen now, and my quest for videogame home entertainment is finally over (and there's room for pure and joyful nostalgia with commodore 64 emulators, too, but I guess that belongs to some other forum in the web...). It's not enough. If anybody had told me: "There will come a day when not only will you play with arcade games at home, but you'll do it enjoying all the conceivable cheats"... well... I would have prayed for a time machine!

Having a basic-to-average skill with basic and object oriented languages, I thought that programming Mame was going to be something new, sure, but not so difficult. Instead I re-lived my childhood computer nightmare: "what is Machine Code?" (Consider that I'm writing from Italy: when I was 12 years old, american boys of my age not only spent less than me for a C64, but had easy access to all the best documentation and all the most useful additional hardware - such as expansion cartridges and assemblers/disassemblers... in the 80's and early 90's finding all this stuff here in Italy was an expensive privilege...)

That said - sorry for the gloomy memories - I'm writing to ask how difficult is the "programming theory" needed for those cheats which allow you to perform fighting special moves with one key or a key combination simpler than the standard one. The only game where I've found this cheat is Street Fighter II Champion Edition, so I'm wondering whether somebody has already took the trouble to write other cheats of the same kind.

If there are other discussion rooms where this topic has been already analysed in depth, I apologize.

Thank you very much: 1. Just for being here; 2. For any answer I'm going to get

Lapo, Rome (Italy)

P. S. Needless to say, in my spaghetti-yankee you'll probably find mispell&grammar horrors. Sorry.

[kelvSYC]

Check out my (slightly outdated) Move List Cheat collection - a collection so large it would, at one point, double the size of Pugsy's latest cheat file if all were added. Link is in my signature.

MLCs take a lot of time searching, and its feasibility boils down to whether step-by-step framing does any real effect (so, while sfa3 is trivial, kof98 is not - to this day kof98 eludes me - but that's because I haven't really used the new debugger to do some work). The complexity of the hardware is also a factor - after all, Williams games are a pita, so we probably won't see Mortal Kombat MLCs in the future.