Support for Samurai Shodown 5 Special Final Edition and Perfect romsets

[mer-curious]

Hello Tux!

I'd like to know if you would be interested in adding support for Samurai Shodown 5 Special Final Edition and Samurai Shodown 5 Special Perfect romsets. As far as I know, the Final Edition version of the game is a hack made by SNK/Yuki themselves and released in the Samurai Shodown Collection game in 2020 for modern consoles. Then some people were able to take it from the game and release it for MAME-based emulators such as FBNeo. This is how the game looks in the official collection (in Japanese):

 

It looks like this version was also sold in home cartridge format in limited quantity by a company called NCI. I found a video of a French collector which apparently got two copies of it. He also explains a little about the game's history, here:

 

Then it seems that some people in the emulation community created a pack of IPS patches to rename the game to "Perfect" as originally advertised by SNK for the NG collection release, then this new patched game became a new clone romset, which looks like this:

Interestingly the Perfect edition is not recognized by Unibios, so there are no cheats for it, as you see below:

But Unibios does recognize the "Final Edition" as clone of 5 Special and shows cheats for it. Maybe the "Final Edition" is an authentic "bootleg" and the "Perfect" edition is just a modded version? I don't know...

Anyway, I'm not sure if we can use the IPS patches solely to turn the Final Edition into the "Perfect" one because the forum requires registration to download the patches and I didn't want to register just for it. So I looked for the Perfect romset and found it in RetroRoms. It is also available at the internet archive, here:

https://archive.org/download/fbnarcade-fullnonmerged/arcade/

So currently FBNeo has the following clones for the Samurai Shodown 5 Special game:

I believe Raine supports all of them, except these new bootleg ones. If you think it's a good idea, maybe Raine could also support these remaining sets too, though I'm not sure whether they really add something good to the official 5 Special game.

It seems that the Perfect edition is worse? Check this video:

Then there is the following website which says the Perfect patch "restores the overkills", which I believe are the uncensored deaths?

https://www.emuline.org/topic/1954-samurai-shodown-v-special-final-edition-from-perfect/

So the guy in the video was testing another (unpatched) version?

Anyway, there are some things I'm still confused about with this game, maybe because it's a hack in the end.

Thank you so much in advance for your time.

PS: you can see in the Emuline link above that there's also a screen capture of the Japanese game logo with a different logo than the "Perfect"...

EDIT: there seems to be another modded version by Exa-Arcadia, which even introduces a "Exa-Arcadia" logo screen after the SNK logo.

 

Edited June 10, 2023 by mer-curious

[Tux]

Well thanks for the info. I am afraid I won't be able to tell much about the interesting points of this rom, but I can at least tell after looking that for fe (final edition) it's an entirely new game, no rom is in common with any other neogeo game contrary to most clones usually. And it's not encrypted, logical if it was made by the community.

For the cheats, unibios recognizes the game because it has exactly the same rom id as samsh5sp (special edition), that is $272. The ram usage might be the same, but the rom is very probably different, anyway there are probably only ram cheats in unibios because it deals with real roms most of the time so they are really read only for it.

And by the way fbneo has some source on github too, and it's quite different from mame source actually, which is a surprise because originally it was made for afterburner before it was integrated to mame, and it was something like a showcase, just to demonstrate the game worked well. So I assumed it was based on mame source, I was wrong apparently ! But it's very readable, and this part is easy to understand since there is no crazy encryption like what the special edition has.

It seems to be Japan only, it ignores the region.

I'll check this perfect thing later, it sounds less interesting, this one seems to be just a hack on top of this final edition. But if it has no cheats in unibios it means they changed the id of the rom, so maybe there are some heavy changes there too...

Anyway samsh5fe is added in git.

Edited June 10, 2023 by Tux

[Tux]

Oh finally for perfect the roms look mostly different so it's probably a worthy clone after all : most sprites are in common (except the 2 last roms), the sound is identical to what's used by fe (for the samples but not for the z80 code !), except that the 68k & z80 have totally different roms, plus the text layer has a different rom too.

So it really doesn't look like a tiny clone, now you'll tell me if it's worth playing it !

Neogeo id : $273, not used until now, that's why it isn't recognized by unibios for the cheats.

Added to git too (samsh5pf).

[pmc2]

Samsh5fe is the ultimate final version of samsho 5 special (NGM/NGH 272 like samsho5sp, which makes sense).

samsh5pf....it's not perfect, it's Samurai Spirits V/Zero Special "Final Edition" or "Location test" version (extracted from samsho neogeocollection) and modified by fans. "Real" Perfect is a patchs (titles screen, overkills, english language for story mode, etc) set applied on the fly in memory, on the original 2004 location test version, and available only on PC(steam/epic/..)/exa-arcade. Note that the NGM 273 is a pure invention for the samsh5pf romhack.

This perfect roms in finalburn is a simple attempt to re-create Perfect (and it's mostly just the title screens and story mode text translations, but it lacks many iterations: modified fatality etc.), so this roms is just a classic hack. The NCI version is an absurdity, as it's the final edition BUT in a box with Perfect covers... adding extreme confusion to the situation (plus a sound roms is erroneous in their cartridge version, but corrected in the latest FBN version).

In resume, Perfect it's the loc test rom which was used as based to make samsho5 perfect on EPIC/STEAM/EXA-Arcade, and the available version in FBN is a simple hack. Note that the exa version is slightly different from the PC version, and has been more reworked, notably to recover the original fatality of the special mvs or better translation of English texts in story mode, but once again, this is memory patching done via an official emulator called Moo .

No official Perfect v1 (epic/etc) or Perfect v2 (EXA) roms are available. Only hacks may exist, and none are identical for the moment.

(sorry for my english)

Edited June 11, 2023 by pmc2

[Tux]

1 hour ago, pmc2 said:

Samsh5fe is the ultimate final version of samsho 5 special (NGM/NGH 272 like samsho5sp, which makes sense).

samsh5pf....it's not perfect, it's Samurai Spirits V/Zero Special "Final Edition" or "Location test" version (extracted from samsho neogeocollection) and modified by fans. "Real" Perfect is a patchs (titles screen, overkills, english language for story mode, etc) set applied on the fly in memory, on the original 2004 location test version, and available only on PC(steam/epic/..)/exa-arcade. Note that the NGM 273 is a pure invention for the samsh5pf romhack.

This perfect roms in finalburn is a simple attempt to re-create Perfect (and it's mostly just the title screens and story mode text translations, but it lacks many iterations: modified fatality etc.), so this roms is just a classic hack. The NCI version is an absurdity, as it's the final edition BUT in a box with Perfect covers... adding extreme confusion to the situation (plus a sound roms is erroneous in their cartridge version, but corrected in the latest FBN version).

In resume, Perfect it's the loc test rom which was used as based to make samsho5 perfect on EPIC/STEAM/EXA-Arcade, and the available version in FBN is a simple hack. Note that the exa version is slightly different from the PC version, and has been more reworked, notably to recover the original fatality of the special mvs or better translation of English texts in story mode, but once again, this is memory patching done via an official emulator called Moo .

No official Perfect v1 (epic/etc) or Perfect v2 (EXA) roms are available. Only hacks may exist, and none are identical for the moment.

(sorry for my english)

Thanks for all the info, and your english is improving !

I guess if pf has some translations included it can be better than nothing then, even if it's not as good as the pc version.

It also means these 2 games can probably accept most of the cheats coming from the special edition, but that's a lot of cheats to test... Maybe later...!

Edited June 11, 2023 by Tux

[mer-curious]

Hello pmc2 and Tux! Thank you Tux for adding the ROMs and pmc2 for the game information.

So, from what I understood, the real ROM that people could take from the Samurai Shodown Neo-Geo Collection game is the "Final Edition" ROM that we have now, right? The "Perfect" version that they advertised for the public is actually a bunch of patches (maybe IPS patches?) that they apply on the fly in the Final Edition ROM so that the game logo becomes "Perfect" or "Kanzenban" and maybe some other changes too (sprites censorship etc), am I correct? The emulation community then couldn't take/decode these patches yet, so they tried to recreate this modified "Perfect" version by applying some IPS patches, but this recreation is different from the one available in the Neo-Geo Collection game. Is this right?

Thank you again for your time. 👍

[Tux]

1 hour ago, mer-curious said:

Hello pmc2 and Tux! Thank you Tux for adding the ROMs and pmc2 for the game information.

So, from what I understood, the real ROM that people could take from the Samurai Shodown Neo-Geo Collection game is the "Final Edition" ROM that we have now, right? The "Perfect" version that they advertised for the public is actually a bunch of patches (maybe IPS patches?) that they apply on the fly in the Final Edition ROM so that the game logo becomes "Perfect" or "Kanzenban" and maybe some other changes too (sprites censorship etc), am I correct? The emulation community then couldn't take/decode these patches yet, so they tried to recreate this modified "Perfect" version by applying some IPS patches, but this recreation is different from the one available in the Neo-Geo Collection game. Is this right?

Thank you again for your time. 👍

I guess you don't even read the story in these games now so you don't care about the translation, but except some sprites modifications there is also some translation for the story mode in the perfect edition... ! It seems to me something like a final++ version, not equivalent to the perfect one on other platforms, but still a little better than the basic final version.

[pmc2]

9 hours ago, mer-curious said:

The emulation community then couldn't take/decode these patches yet, so they tried to recreate this modified "Perfect" version by applying some IPS patches, but this recreation is different from the one available in the Neo-Geo Collection game. Is this right?

 

Yes. that's why it's just a hack, with no real interest (playable in roms or by ips patch to be applied to the basic roms: samsho5fe). The real perfect, as I said, is only playable on PC (steam/etc) or EXA arcade.