As we said before in our previous article : In the 1980’s Data East released the Arcade fighting game of Karate Champ; A game which established and popularized the one-on-one fighting game genre, for which it is considered one of the most influential games of all time. Well fast forward to today and thanks to another heads up from Saberman, we’ve been told JOTD has made available a beta version of this Arcade game: A game that was also released for systems such as the Apple II, C64 and the NES.

“Karate Champ is a 1984 arcade fighting game developed by Technōs Japan and released by Data East. A variety of moves can be performed using the dual-joystick controls using a best-of-three matches format like later fighting games. The game was a commercial blockbuster where it was the highest-grossing arcade game of 1985 and the best-selling home computer game up until 1989. An updated version that allows two players the option to compete against each other was released in 1984 under the title Karate Champ — Player vs Player. It featured a multiplayer mode and more varied gameplay. It was released for the arcades shortly after the original during the same year, also published by Data East”. – Wikipedia

Dev Notes : A very early alpha version with a lot of bugs & crashes, also slow, but game is playable up to a point (bull stage is buggy and may crash the machine). ATM it needs 2MB of memory so no A500/1MB. I’ll try to reduce that. Also game will be slow on real machines without fastmem for the moment. As always before I add better controls: 5 inserts coins, 1 or 2 start games. It also needs CD32 joypads and on real CD32 joypads you’ll find that the controls are awkwards because of a different position on WinUAE joypads. But it’s a start. Controls are joystick + buttons (2nd joystick). There’s a practice mode that shows most of the moves.

Links 1) Discussion  2) Download ( Save As ) [New Version 19/08/23]