When Mortal Kombat came out for the SNES and Sega Genesis, fans were split between Nintendo’s censored version and Sega’s “better” version with all the blood and gore (hidden behind its famous cheat code). Of course the superior version was the one you played on arcade and now there’s a chance to play it via a cool ROM by Linkuei:
Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition is the sort of ROM hack where every facet of the game has been retouched. All sorts of sound effects and animations that were omitted in the 1993 translation to the Genesis have now been restored in higher quality. Every fighter’s look was remastered to more closely match the arcade presentation complete with move timing tweaks. Secret characters like Reptile, Noob Saibot, and Ermac are all playable, plus all the character bios from the arcade game’s attract mode make an appearance. An SRAM save feature was implemented in order to save high scores, and for an additional dose of authenticity there’s even a “DIP switch” configuration screen where you can set it to free play.
But you could take this a step further. ROMs are playable on almost any device (if the weirdest places to play Google Stadia is anything to go by). With access to the right tools, you could put this into a mini arcade or a fully-sized one and get the full experience. Of course, you could just play the MAME version but if you’re gonna go all out for a ROM hack, playing it on a custom-built arcade machine is hard to beat.
