Some games simply refuse to die, and honestly? I’m glad Ultra Street Fighter IV is one of them. Capcom’s 2014 fighter helped drag the entire genre back into the spotlight, but its online play has always been the weak link — crusty old delay-based netcode in an era where rollback is the standard. Now, two fan projects are fixing that from the ground up.
The projects are SF4Enhanced, built by developer Faabi, and SF4 Ember Netplay, from Kabiefox and the Confetti3 crew. Both are unofficial mods built on Anthony Danducci’s reverse-engineered sf4e, and both do the same ambitious thing: bolt GGPO-style rollback netcode onto the Steam version of USF4. No port forwarding to fiddle with, private rollback rooms for up to 16 players — the dream, basically.
Ember just crossed a real milestone. Its v1.0.0 release landed earlier this month, adding controller and keyboard table controls, spectator lock-in, rollback-correct replays, and fixes for long-session crashes — and the release notes say the full build passed all 87 automated tests. A v1.0.1 followed days later. This is the steadier-looking of the two builds, from the reports.
Here’s the twist, though: the other project already lost its developer. Faabi open-sourced SF4Enhanced at v0.5.5 in late September, then announced this week that he’s stepping away after just three weeks, describing the whole thing as a C++ learning exercise and giving a nod to Ember as the surviving project, according to DashFight. One survivor, one retiree — the race ended early.
Early reactions have been the classic fighting-game mix of hype and side-eye. Pro player Chris Tatarian was reportedly “blown away” and former tournament organizer OmegaTomHanks called the mods “incredible,” per Console Classics — but other testers found the lag worse than vanilla USF4 in spots. Rollback isn’t magic, folks. Keep the hype in check: both projects self-label as experimental, with rare desyncs and crashes on the known-issues list.
A quick transparency note: DashFight reports both projects were developed with significant help from Anthropic’s Claude. That’s the outlet’s characterization, not the developers’ own claim — but it’s worth being upfront about it. The reverse-engineering groundwork, testing gauntlets, and community lobbies are very much human regardless.
The ethical side is clean: these are patch-style mods requiring a legitimately purchased Steam copy. No ROMs, no ISOs, nothing shady — just fan engineers dragging a classic’s netcode into the modern era.
Check out some Ember netplay footage in action below:
Between Ember’s 1.0 milestone and the community already piling into rooms, this might be the best moment in a decade to revisit the game that gave us Juri. So — who’s dusting off their Steam copy? See you in the rollback lobbies.
Sources: Console Classics, DashFight, SF4 Ember Netplay on GitHub.