If you download version 1.65 today, here is a curated list of games that still shine:
Kawaks introduced state saving long before it was standard in arcade emulation. You could:
For competitive players, this was transformative. Suddenly, you could practice the same difficult link combo in Street Fighter Alpha 3 hundreds of times without replaying the first five stages. kawaks arcade emulator
No article on emulation is complete without addressing the elephant in the room.
If you truly love The King of Fighters '98, consider buying the official Code Mystics port. If you want to test a ROM hack you made yourself, Kawaks remains a valid research tool. If you download version 1
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, if you wanted to play Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike or The King of Fighters 2002 on your Windows PC, you had two options: spend thousands on a original arcade motherboard (the CPS-2 or Neo Geo MVS), or download a tiny, powerful piece of software called Kawaks.
While MAME aimed to emulate everything, Kawaks focused on doing one thing extremely well: emulating Capcom’s CPS-1, CPS-2, and SNK’s Neo Geo hardware. For fighting game enthusiasts, it wasn't just an emulator—it was a time machine, a training tool, and a social hub rolled into a 2MB executable. Kawaks introduced state saving long before it was
Extract the folder to C:\Kawaks\ (avoid spaces in the path to prevent old command-line issues). The default folders are: