M.U.G.E.N engine

The engine allows anyone to create characters, background stages and other game objects through interpreted text files, graphics, and sound compilations. It supports various types of audio formats such as MP3 and MIDI initially, although it can be configured to play various audio formats via Winamp plugins, such as ADX and OGG, as background music during gameplay or at other points such as an introduction or the select screen. The engine allows for most of the same type of functionality found in most any commercial 2D fighting games, up to and including close recreation of those games' characters and gameplay.

Before the existence of many development tools available today, Elecbyte provided DOS command-line utilities to assist in the development, as well as tutorials and documentation. Content produced by Elecbyte also included developer comments within the files to be used as guides. MUGEN's coding structure for content is text-based, and can be accessed and modified in any text editor, such as wordpad. The sprite format is in PCX 256-color 16-bit graphics files. Audio for screenpacks and characters use WAV. Both the PCX and WAV files are compiled in SFF and SND archives respectively, and require editing tools to modify the contents thereof.

With each revision of M.U.G.E.N there have been compatibility problems with changes and additions in state controllers, triggers, and with the latest Linux and Windows distributions, SFF's. During Elecbyte's disappearance, compatibility problems arising from new versions were nonexistent. Elecbyte never provided an automated updater, citing the impossibility of such a feat. However, they did provide a detailed change log for each version to facilitate updating to a new version of the engine. In response, a third-party tool called SFFextract was created to extract the pcx files of an SFF and produce a txt file to pipe into sprmaker. SFFextract when used properly is able to assist in modifying an SFF file so later M.U.G.E.N versions could handle.