Street Fighter Alpha 3 (English restoration)

[strygo]

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

Street Fighter Alpha 3's US arcade release gave each fighter eight generic win quotes. The Japanese game also had a line for each opponent: 625 more quotes that never made it into the English arcade version.

This brings back all 825 Japanese win quotes in English, along with the detailed stage locations. Biographies, rival dialogue and endings follow the Japanese script, keeping Capcom's English where it was accurate and using Alpha 3 MAX's wording where it fits.

What's in it​

• All 825 Japanese win quotes in English, including the 625 opponent-specific lines missing from the US arcade version.
• All 24 detailed stage locations in English, centered in the original panels.
• Biographies, rival and boss dialogue, and endings that follow the Japanese script. The arcade ending scenes and page timing stay intact.
• Japanese Regulation OFF by default, with red hit blood and the full defeat and ending effects. The operator can still switch it on.
• Japanese 980904 gameplay, secret-character access, difficulty and Turbo 1 defaults.
• USA presentation: Alpha branding, English A / X / V-ISM labels and descriptions, score rankings, Western names, title and entry announcements, and operator menus.

English A / X / V-ISM selection.​

New in rc1​

First public release: the Japanese arcade game in English, with its full win-quote pool, detailed stage locations, story and endings, and USA presentation.

Getting it running​

• You need your own Japanese Street Fighter Zero 3 romset, sfz3j. Split sets also need the sfa3 parent and qsound.zip. The kit takes merged, split or non-merged sets, as a .zip, a .7z or a folder. No game data is hosted.
• The IPS kit builds the English restoration for MAME.
• On MiSTer, use the stock romset and the MRA kit with Jotego's jtcps2 core. It appears under _Arcade/_Arcade Patches/_Restorations.
• 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.