Street Fighter Alpha 2 (English restoration)

[strygo]

Download and instructions at arcadepatches.com
Current version: rc1 (October 11, 2026)​

Choose the Japan experience or the USA experience. The USA FEATURES setting lets you keep Japan's original roster or enable the USA version's extra fighters: Evil Ryu, EX Dhalsim and EX Zangief. You can make that choice in any of the three builds.

Both choices keep the restored Japanese content. The English releases cut corners: a few random win quotes instead of Japan's matchup and health-based choices, shorter story and ending scenes, country names instead of places on the map, white blood and a blank Manual guard panel. This brings all those details back.

Choose USA for Alpha 2 in English, Asia for Zero 2 in English with Asia's own stage details, or Japan for Zero 2 in Japanese.

What's in it​

• Every Japanese win quote in English, picked by opponent and remaining health, with Japan's held-button quote pick.
• Story and endings in Japan's order and timing, including the pages the English versions cut.
• English place names on the next-stage map.
• Red blood, with a REGULATION operator setting for white blood, off by default.
• Birdie's third victory pose, Dan's ending voice and a Manual guard panel that explains itself.
• Japan or USA roster, in every build. On the operator menu's GAME page, USA FEATURES OFF keeps Japan's original roster; ON makes Evil Ryu, EX Dhalsim and EX Zangief selectable by their USA codes. It starts ON in the USA build and OFF in Japan and Asia.
• Japan's computer opponents, two-player damage and factory settings.
• Capcom's later fixes for Charlie's Sonic Boom and Chun-Li's Kikoken.

Win quotes from the Japanese game, in English.

Red blood on hits, as in Japan.

The Manual guard panel explains itself.​

New in rc1​

First public release.

Getting it running​

• You need your own Japanese Street Fighter Zero 2 romset, sfz2j, merged, split or non-merged, as a .zip, a .7z or a folder. No game data is hosted.
• One IPS kit builds all three regions. They run in MAME and HBMAME and on MiSTer. The companion HBMAME definitions are sfa2ru, sfz2ra and sfz2rj.
• On MiSTer, use the stock romset and the MRA kit with Jotego's jtcps2 core. The builds appear under _Arcade/_Arcade Patches/_Restorations, with Asia and Japan in their regional subfolders. Split sets also need qsound.zip.
• MAME reports checksum warnings for the patched files. That's expected, and the game plays normally.

Full instructions are on the project page.

This is a release candidate. Bug reports and suggestions are welcome right here. Tell me which build you ran and what you saw.