Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper (Arcade backport)

[strygo]

Street Fighter Zero 3 Upper (Japan).

Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper (USA).

Download and instructions at arcadepatches.com
Current version: rc1 (November 4, 2026)​

Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper brought Guile, Fei Long, Dee Jay, T. Hawk and the console roster to the arcade on NAOMI. Capcom later included Upper in Street Fighter Alpha Anthology on PlayStation 2, but it never had a CPS-2 release.

This backport brings Upper to CPS-2, on the expanded CPS+ system. The added stages, voices and music use the game's own graphics and QSound hardware.

What's in it​

• Guile, Fei Long, Dee Jay, T. Hawk, Evil Ryu and Shin Akuma join the playable roster, in A-, X- and V-ISM.
• The boxer, Juli and Juni have their own cells on the character-select screen. The boxer is Balrog in the USA build and M. Bison in the Japan build.
• Added stages, arcade endings, voices and QSound music, including Guile, Fei Long, Dee Jay and T. Hawk's stages and endings.
• Upper's character-select layout, colors and title screens.
• Two builds: USA as Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper, including the English restoration, and Japan as Street Fighter Zero 3 Upper, with Japanese text and names.
• Arcade mode and its two-player challenge. World Tour, Dramatic Battle and the other console modes are not included.

Choose from the expanded Upper roster.

Guile and Fei Long on Guile's stage.​

Getting it running​

• On MiSTer, it needs the included CPS+ core and 128 MB SDRAM. On a computer, it needs an HBMAME or FBNeo build that includes the Upper sets.
• You need your own arcade romsets in canonical MAME format: sfa3, sfa3u, sfz3j and qsound.
• You also need your own USA Street Fighter Alpha Anthology and Japanese Street Fighter Zero: Fighter's Generation PlayStation 2 disc images, plus the Street Fighter Zero 3 Upper NAOMI GD-ROM CHD and sfz3ugd.zip PIC archive. No game data is hosted.
• The Arcade Patches builder app prepares Python and its dependencies and runs the kit against your files. Use new, empty work and output folders with at least 8 GiB free.
• The kit writes separate HBMAME, FBNeo and MiSTer outputs, with sfa3up for USA and sfz3up for Japan.
• On MiSTer, copy the contents of the generated mister/ folder to the root of your SD card. The game entries go under _Arcade/_Arcade Patches/_Restorations, with Japan in its _Japan subfolder.

Full instructions are on the project page.

This is a release candidate. Bug reports and suggestions are welcome right here. Tell me which region, fighter, ISM and platform you ran, what you did and what you saw. A short video is helpful too.

Fan work, unaffiliated with Capcom.

 

[HornheaDD]

holy shit

 

[ShinMamoruX]

Installed scipy with numpy already installed. But I Ran into an error when I tried to build it 3 times.

 

[strygo]

Installed scipy with numpy already installed. But I Ran into an error when I tried to build it 3 times.

Thanks for reporting this. That error means the extracted kit folder doesn’t match its file list, often because an extra file was added or extraction missed something. Try extracting the ZIP into a new, empty folder, keeping your ROMs and output folders outside it. The updated installer now names the missing or extra files.

For an easier setup, I recommend ArcadePatches. Select Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper, add the folders containing your original ROMs and disc images, then choose Build. It identifies the required files and prepares the dependencies automatically.

If you prefer the standalone command, remember to replace the /path/to/... examples with your actual paths.

 

[Ipla]

Thanks for the Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper backport, @strygo ! Really nice to see this version brought to CPS-2.

I have a question about the opposite direction. As far as I understand, Capcom used the original NAOMI version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper as the base for the version included in Capcom Fighting Collection 2, and then expanded it with Maki, Yun, Eagle and Ingrid.

Since the modern version is still based on the NAOMI game, do you think it would be technically possible to backport those additions into the original NAOMI version?

Basically, creating an updated NAOMI build of Upper with the complete expanded roster from the Fighting Collection 2 release.

Just curious if something like that would be technically feasible.

 

[ShinMamoruX]

Thanks for reporting this. That error means the extracted kit folder doesn’t match its file list, often because an extra file was added or extraction missed something. Try extracting the ZIP into a new, empty folder, keeping your ROMs and output folders outside it. The updated installer now names the missing or extra files.

For an easier setup, I recommend ArcadePatches. Select Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper, add the folders containing your original ROMs and disc images, then choose Build. It identifies the required files and prepares the dependencies automatically.

If you prefer the standalone command, remember to replace the /path/to/... examples with your actual paths.

So I managed to use the arcade patches and did everything correctly however I got an error no.22 in the report as I was building it.

 

[strygo]

So I managed to use the arcade patches and did everything correctly however I got an error no.22 in the report as I was building it.

We were able to figure this out. The patcher was updated to handle his setup.

 

[Ipla]

I noticed a few graphical issues while playing:

• During attract mode, Evil Ryu briefly appears in his hit/recoil animation.
• When selecting Akuma, some garbled graphics briefly appear in his portrait.
• The same thing happens when selecting Random.

 

[strygo]

I noticed a few graphical issues while playing:

• During attract mode, Evil Ryu briefly appears in his hit/recoil animation.
• When selecting Akuma, some garbled graphics briefly appear in his portrait.
• The same thing happens when selecting Random.

Thank you. First one is fixed. Can you share screenshots of #2 and #3?