Kung Fu Ryu

2nd place, Silly Venture 2026 WE
Atari XL/XE 1 MB with VBXE

About the gamewhat it is and who made it

Kung Fu Ryu is our fan mod of Kung-Fu Master EX, made for the game compo at Silly Venture 2026 WE. Ryu from Street Fighter II takes the place of Thomas, and the five floors of the temple are replaced by one floor that never ends. You walk right, enemies come from both sides and the bosses wait along the way.

You play as Ryu, Sakura or Scorpion. Each of them has three special moves, and all of them can be done on a one-button joystick. Every boss you beat starts a new stage: the floor changes its colours and its name, and every two stages the music changes too. From stage 3 the bosses also come in pairs. Some of them are evil: faster, in different colours, with a glowing red eye.

The intro tells how Ryu got here. After the Street Fighter tournament he trains under a waterfall and goes for a slow walk at sunset. Then a portal opens above his head and pulls him in, with Sakura and Scorpion right behind him.

We made the game in 11 days, from the first build on 31.10.2026 to the compo deadline on 10.11.2026. It runs on the engine of Kung-Fu Master EX, at 50 frames per second.

Credits

Code

Solo, Laoo

NGA assembler

Laoo

Music, SFX

Miker

RMT player

Raster/C.P.U.

Kung Fu Ryu is a free, non-commercial fan game. Kung-Fu Master was made by Irem (1984). Ryu and Sakura come from the Street Fighter games by Capcom, Scorpion from Mortal Kombat by Midway.

Silly Venture 2026 WEAtari XL/XE Game Compo, Gdańsk, 12-15.11.2026

The 2nd place trophy from Silly Venture 2026 WE

2nd placeout of 12 games

Kung Fu Ryu was our entry in the Atari XL/XE Game Compo at Silly Venture 2026 Winter Edition. The voters at the party gave it second place among twelve games.

Thank you to everyone who voted for us, and to the organisers for the party.

The film shown on the big screen is in the gallery, the party version of the game is in downloads.

Characters and movesthree characters, three special moves each

Ryu

Ryu

Street Fighter II

  • Hadouken, a fireball
  • Shoryuken, a rising punch
  • Tatsumaki, a spinning kick
Sakura

Sakura

Street Fighter Alpha 2

  • Hadouken, a fireball
  • Shououken, a running rising punch
  • Shunpukyaku, a spinning kick
Scorpion

Scorpion

Mortal Kombat

  • Spear, pulls the enemy in and stuns him
  • Uppercut, sends the enemy flying
  • Slide, goes under high knives

Special moves

"Forward" and "back" mean the direction your character is facing.

Hadouken, Spear

Down, down-forward, forward and any button. You can skip the diagonal, and you have about 0.4 s to press the button after the motion. Scorpion can also hold any button for half a second.

Shoryuken, Shououken

Up and the button pressed together. Or hold the button for about half a second with the stick in the middle or forward: the move comes out by itself.

Tatsumaki, Shunpukyaku

Hold the button, then pull the stick back and keep it there until the move comes out. With two buttons: hold kick.

Uppercut, Slide

Uppercut is Scorpion's low punch. With a stunned enemy in front of you, any button does it. Slide: hold down-forward and keep the button held for half a second.

When enemies grab you

Up and the button, or a held button, breaks the hold with a Shoryuken and hits the ones holding you. Wiggling the joystick works too.

Controls and options

One button

buttonkick
left or right + buttonpunch
down + buttonlow kick
down-diagonal + buttonlow punch
button in the airjump kick

Two buttons

First button kicks, second button punches. The second button is on pin 9 (a 7800-style pad or Joy 2B+).

Menu

BUTTONS: 1 or 2. DIFFICULTY: CHILLED, ARCADE, NORMAL or INSANE. AUTO PLAY: the computer plays, you watch.

Continue

When you lose your last life, you get a countdown from 10 next to a car, while the giant kicks it to pieces. Press the button before zero and you go on from the same stage, with your score.

One endless floor

No stairs and no time limit. The floor loops, the stage counter goes up after each group of bosses, and the game gets harder as you go.

Bosses on the way

The stick fighter, the boomerang thrower, the giant and Mr. X from Kung-Fu Master. Alone, in pairs, in the middle of a stage, and in evil versions.

15 lands

From Shaolin Temple and Winter Palace to Tokyo Night and Inferno. Each one recolours the floor and the enemies, and shows its name when you enter.

Sound

Miker arranged the themes of Ryu, Sakura, Ken, Balrog and Scorpion for POKEY. Every character has voice samples for the special moves. With a second POKEY the sound is in stereo, with a short echo.

More info and technical specshow the game was made and what is inside

Extended RAM

54 of 64

banks used, 16 KB each (864 KB of 1 MB)

VBXE memory used

99%

of 512 KB, about 4 KB free during the game

Character frames

251

Ryu 77 (with the title logo), Sakura 104, Scorpion 70

Character slot

160 KB

of VBXE memory for the character you play

.xex

330 KB

338,334 B compressed, 1.15 MB unpacked

Made in

11 days

31.10 - 10.11.2026

Numbers for the party version.

Character packs

A character is a pack stored in extended RAM: sprite frames, animation and timing tables, a palette and voice samples. When you pick a character, we copy its pack into one slot in VBXE memory. The engine has no frame numbers of its own, it reads everything from the pack, so adding a character does not change the game code.

For coders: 7 to 11 banks per character; the frame tables and the animation block go to RAM, the sprites to a 160 KB slot in VBXE memory, the colours to palette entries 192-255.

Bosses loaded while you walk

Boss sprites are also kept in extended RAM. During the march we copy the next boss into VBXE memory in the time each frame has left, about 16 KB per second. The first two bosses are ready about 3 seconds after the start. There are no loading screens between stages.

For coders: 64-byte chunks while the main loop waits for scan line 156; the extended bank is switched in only in lines 248-28, because ANTIC reads the floor through the same $4000 window on screen.

Timings from the arcades

Move timings, jump heights, reach and hit boxes were measured frame by frame in MAME: Ryu in Street Fighter II Champion Edition, Sakura in Street Fighter Alpha 2, Scorpion in Mortal Kombat. Enemies and bosses still follow the Kung-Fu Master arcade code.

Voice samples

Each character has about 5 seconds of its own samples: "Hadouken", "Shoryuken", "Tatsumaki Senpukyaku", "Get over here!". They play on POKEY together with the music and the sound effects.

For coders: 4-bit samples, two per byte, played by a timer interrupt with two handlers that take turns (80 and 75 cycles). The RMT player and the music sit in an extended bank and are called from the vertical blank.

A mirrored engine

Kung-Fu Master EX starts by walking left, Kung Fu Ryu goes right. The game logic still walks left. We mirror the picture instead: the sprites, the background and the joystick.

NGA assembler

The game is written in 6502 assembly for NGA, a new assembler by Laoo. NGA places code and data in memory by itself, also in the 64 banks of extended RAM and in VBXE memory, and checks memory banking at build time.

Tools

Sprites were cut and scaled in Sprite Maker NG, our own tool. Tests ran in AltirraSDL by ilmenit, a fork of Altirra by phaeron (Avery Lee), driven by scripts through its bridge.

Downloadthe game and what you need to run it

Game - party version

kfr.xex
Compressed, 330 KB. For SIO2PC and other SIO loaders. Unpacking takes about 20 seconds.

kfr-raw.xex
Not compressed, 1.15 MB. For SIDE, hard disks and fast loaders.

This is the version shown at Silly Venture 2026 WE (10.11.2026). An update with fixes is in the works.

Requirements

  • Atari XL/XE with 1 MB of RAM
  • VBXE with FX core 1.26 or newer
  • PAL
  • Joystick in port 1, one or two buttons
  • Optional: second POKEY for stereo
  • Emulator: Altirra 4.40 or newer, with VBXE and 1088K memory

Controls

  • Up: jump, down: crouch
  • One button: button alone = kick, with left or right = punch
  • Two buttons: first = kick, second = punch
  • Special moves: see Characters and moves
  • One player

ContactNew Generation

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