How to play Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition on Mac

Game summary

This game is a hack of Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, notable for modifying many gameplay aspects, the most noticeable being the ability to transform into other characters and being able to pull off special moves in midair. Some of the special moves were modified, such as the Hadokens, which can either home in on the opponent or travel extremely fast, as well as 7 different characters being able to execute them as opposed to just Ryu and Ken. Zangief moves noticeably faster in this game, and E. Honda can pull off Hadokens when performing his Hyakuretsu Harite. The graphics and music are identical to those in the original game aside from the title's logo, which is now rainbow-coloured, which is where this hack gets its name from. Although there are many different revisions of this hack readily dumped and emulated, several versions are still left undumped. The rampant craziness with these hacks and the popularity of arcade distributors putting these hacks in machines was one of the reasons behind the creation of the legitimate Street Fighter II: Turbo Hyper Fighting update.
First released: Dec 1992

Play Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition like you would on any PC.
Did it work?
Help us improve our guide by letting us know if it worked for you.
👎👍