# Frequently asked questions (FAQ) list for M.U.G.E.N

# General

Q. Where's the latest version of M.U.G.E.N? --- http://elecbyte.com/mugen

Q. How do I add characters and stages? --- Unzip your character into a new folder under the chars/ folder. Note the name of the character's .def file.

Using a text editor such as Notepad, browse to the data/ folder in your M.U.G.E.N installation, and then open select.def. In the [Characters] group at the top, add a line that looks like:

> playerdir/player.def, stages/stage.def

playerdir should be the name of the folder you placed the character files in, and player.def should be the player's .def file. stage.def should be the name of the player's stage. If you do not specify a stage, it will be randomly chosen in the game. The comments in select.def have additional information.

If your player's .def file name and folder name are the same (for instance, the folder is named kiwi/ and the .def file is kiwi.def), then you can just enter "kiwi" instead of "kiwi/kiwi.def" (without the quotes).

Q. How do I increase the number of slots in the character select screen? ---

Using a text editor such as Notepad, browse to the data folder and open mugen.cfg. Under the [Options] group, search for a line:

> motif = data/mugen1/system.def

and change it to:

> motif = data/big/system.def

If you need more space, open the corresponding system.def file with a text editor. Search for the [Select Info] group. Increase the value of "rows" and "columns" to create more slots for additional characters.

You may need to adjust the pos parameter to place the newly-sized boxes correctly on the screen.

Q. Is M.U.G.E.N free? --- Yes, M.U.G.E.N is free for personal use. For other uses, please contact us. The full license text is in our readme file. http://elecbyte.com/mugendocs/readme.txt

Q. Is M.U.G.E.N legal? --- Yes, the engine is legal. But you may be wondering about all those M.U.G.E.N characters your fellow users made from other games or cartoons. That's been a subject of debate in M.U.G.E.N communities for as long as the engine has existed. As far as we can tell, the answer for that lies between "no" and "maybe", and given that we advise you to use your own judgment.

Personally, we'd like to see more original content being made for M.U.G.E.N.

Q. Can I give away or sell a game I make with M.U.G.E.N? --- We don't allow redistribution of the M.U.G.E.N engine without our permission. This means that complete game distributions, whether free or not, are not permitted by our license.

However, we don't place any restrictions on the content you create, so you can distribute your game without the M.U.G.E.N engine. Instruct your users to get the latest version of M.U.G.E.N from our site (elecbyte.com) and then unzip your game into their M.U.G.E.N installation.

Of course, if you use any third party content in your game, please remember to first get permission from the rightful owners.

Q. Can I distribute content based on KFM or other sample content included with M.U.G.E.N? --- All the sample content licensed under the Creative Commons Noncommercial License. Attribution is optional.

Basically, it means you don't need our permission to build upon or use parts of any of that content for non-commercial purposes. In fact, we encourage you to use the sample content as a starting point for your projects and replacing the graphics, sounds and behaviors.

If you've replaced just about all the graphics and sounds while working off our sample content, we don't consider your content to be derivative. That means we don't put any restrictions on your content at that point.

You are free to post videos and screenshots that include our sample content.

You can find more info about the CC License here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Q. Where can I learn more? --- Read the documentation, browse our wiki, or look around our forum.

http://elecbyte.com/mugendocs/mugen.html http://elecbyte.com/wiki http://elecbyte.com/forum

Q. What does M.U.G.E.N stand for? --- We really don't remember what it stands for. In the spirit of how M.U.G.E.N works, you are free to customize your own words for it.

Q. Where can I download Winmugen, older MUGEN, etc.? --- ...

# Features

Q. What features can I expect in the near future? --- We are considering the following for 1.1: - Updated graphics engine. - Minor additions to CNS.

Q. What features can I expect in the long term? --- We haven't started work on this yet, but we'd like to overhaul the architecture with a focus on a increasing the flexibility of scripting character behavior.

Q. Will you add tag battle? --- We're working on it.

Q. Will you add netplay? --- Not in the near future.

# Troubleshooting

Q. I edited system.def but none of the changes take effect. Why? --- The default motif in M.U.G.E.N 1.0 is the "mugen1" motif. So you need to edit the system.def file in data/mugen1/ instead of the one in the data/ folder.

Q. How do I adjust the volume of characters and music? --- ...

Q. I put a winamp dll into the plugins folder but it doesn't work. Why? --- ...

Q. The motif ("screenpack") I downloaded looks wrong. How come? --- Some motifs are made for the "Doubleres = 4" (a.k.a. "D4") setting in the old M.U.G.E.N. Others are made for unofficial hacks of the engine. We obviously don't provide support for those, but with some editing you can get them to work with the current release of M.U.G.E.N.

Q. Why is the screen cut off at the top/bottom? --- M.U.G.E.N 1.0 defaults to a widescreen aspect. This makes the screen look cramped for some people. You can change back to a normal aspect by editing the [Config] section in mugen.cfg:

GameWidth = 1280 -> change this to 640 GameHeight = 720 -> change this to 480

More stage aspect options will be added in 1.1.

Q. When I run MUGEN I get an error that the application configuration is incorrect. What can I do?

"This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem"

Download and install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable to see if it fixes your problem. Post a bug report in our forum if it doesn't. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A5C84275-3B97-4AB7-A40D-3802B2AF5FC2

Q. M.U.G.E.N runs slowly even though I have the latest video card. Why? --- The most common slowdown issue is due to the video renderer. M.U.G.E.N 1.0 has an outdated renderer that's limited by the speed of your CPU, not graphics card. You can see slowdown when there's a lot of effects on screen. We're working on a solution that will take advantage of your graphics card.

Other things you can do to speed up M.U.G.E.N:

Close other applications
  Closing other CPU or memory-intensive applications may speed up M.U.G.E.N.
Use the most efficient video mode
  Running in a window can be slow on some systens. Try running in fullscreen. Set FullScreen = 1 in mugen.cfg.
Set a smaller resolution
  Try 640x480 or 640x360 if MUGEN is running too slowly in HD resolutions.
Turn off shadows
  You can turn shadows off to speed up drawing. Look in data/mugen.cfg and set the "DrawShadows" option under [Config] to 0.
Use frameskip
  Auto-frameskip is enabled by default. The game will not draw some frames in case the computer is not fast enough, and this helps maintain a constant game speed. If you'd like to run at a constant framerate, you can hit Ctrl-F repeatedly to adjust the frameskip. It will switch from "auto" to "skip none" to "skip 1" to "skip 2" and then back to "auto". This works only when you are in the fight screen.
Free up memory
  Memory may be swapped to the hard disk when you run low, and this will severely impact performance. See the next section on how to reduce memory usage.
Disable precaching
  If you find the game slows down too much when loading in the background, you can disable precaching. This will increase load times, however. Under [Misc], set precache = 0.

Sometimes slowdown is caused by excessive memory usage. If your computer has less than 3GB of RAM, you can try these:

Reduce the player cache
  M.U.G.E.N will try to keep players in memory in order to reduce loading times. You might want to reduce the number of players that are kept in memory at any one time. Open up data/mugen.cfg and look under the [Misc] section. Change PlayerCache to a smaller number. 0 will save you the most memory.
Reduce the number of characters
  Having a large number of characters can consume a substantial amount of memory. You can split your character roster up between multiple motifs. See "Using Motifs" in the readme file.
Disable buffered read
  You can save memory while loading characters by turning this option off. It is found under the [Misc] section, and called "BufferedRead". Loading times will increase as a result.
Reduce effects and limits
  Set the options under [Config] to a smaller numbers (see mugen.cfg for descriptions). Reducing HelperMax gives the most savings.
Enable system file unload
  Set UnloadSystem under [Misc] to 1.
Optimize your sprite files
  When you generate a sprite file, enable settings such as sprite.autocrop and sprite.detectduplicates. If your sprites use 32 colors or less consider using lz5 compression (see work/kfm/kfm-sff-optimized.def).

Q. My problem isn't listed in this FAQ. Where can I get help? --- Post your questions to our community forum. http://elecbyte.com/forum

# Ports, Source and Versions of M.U.G.E.N

Q. How do I update my stuff to M.U.G.E.N 1.0? --- M.U.G.E.N 1.0 is compatible with most content from 2002. In order to use the new features in 1.0, you will need to update your characters, stages and motifs. See:

http://elecbyte.com/wiki/index.php/Updating_to_1.0

Q. I see unofficial versions of M.U.G.E.N on the web. Can I use them? --- Those releases are unauthorized hacks of an early private beta. We won't take any responsibility for what happens if you use those, and we don't officially support any content made for them.

If you host one of these unofficial versions on your website, please link to our site instead instead of those downloads. http://elecbyte.com/mugen

Q. Will you port M.U.G.E.N to Mac/Linux/Dreamcast/etc? --- Due to our limited resources, we are not considering any ports.

Q. Will you release the source code? --- While we appreciate the enthusiasm from fellow coders, we do not plan to release the source code to M.U.G.E.N.

However, information about the file formats we use is publicly available.

Q. Will future versions of M.U.G.E.N be compatible with my characters? --- The goal for M.U.G.E.N 1.0 is to be compatible with most of the existing content available today. Future versions may sacrifice compatibility for new features.

# Tools

Q. I clicked sprmake2.exe (or other tool) and nothing happens. What's wrong? --- Our tools require you to use them from the command prompt. Click Start -> Run and enter "cmd" (without the quotes) and press enter. If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can shift-right-click on your mugen folder and choose "Open command window here".

Q. Are there any graphical tools available? --- There are currently no first-party graphical tools for editing characters, stages or motifs.

If you have made one and would like it listed in this FAQ, please let us know.