Samurai Shodown V - RePublish
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This is patch that, in essence, takes the Japanese version of the game (Samurai Spirits Zero for PS2), and applies a few of the changes that were made for the European release of Samurai Shodown V for PS2, but not all of them.

Why do this?
The European release by Ignition has a few flaws:
-There is a terrible smear applied over all the gameplay, which looks incredibly terrible. The Japanese version was very clean and did not have this.
-The image is strethed to fill out more of the screen, which gives an improper picel count, and contributes to the bluriness.
-It swaps the Start and the Select buttons, which is a good idea for PS2, but it's innacurate to the original Neo Geo release, and it also makes the suicide and weapon drop moves more compicated to perform, or impossible in some modes.
-There is English VO, which--while servieable--not to my taste

So specifically this patch fixes all of that, and retains the beneits, such as:
-Full English translation of the story mode, with proper font and character set, unlike the common hacks available out there for Neo Geo
-Translations of the skill list.
-Translations of the title screen and menu.

And that's it. It otherwise retains the crisp visual presentiation and some of the Japanese flair of the series, such as the announcement cards (which are quite beautiful compared ot the very ugly English ones), while keeping English presentation where it makes sense.
Because this is originally Japanese, it also means the select button O, and the cancel button is X, and the save file format is Japanese.

Bonus:
Home ports typically give you access to boss characters, and SSV was no exception. It let you play as the two sub boss characters, giving the m a full story and an official spot on the player selection screen, and the hidden character Poppy even has a simplified code to seelct him (Just hold start over Galford and press any attack button).
However, Gaoh, was left out of this equation, most liekly because he was broken in some ways, and absolutely has no story mode options.

Well, with this patch he is now selectable in both Practice and Versus mode, similar to other SNK games of the time that let you pick boss characters. There's even a secret code to select him in versus mode.

To select Gaoh in versus, simply hold start while selecting Random. In Practice, he is among the list of characters you can set either Player 1 or 2 as.

This code does not work in single player, which I've done on purpose to prevent you from crashing your PS2.
(Pro Tip, if your friend is a real jerk, he can challenge you while you're playing through the story mode, and he can then pick Gaoh. You better beat him though, because your jerk friend wins, he'll crash your PS2)


Why 0.8?
-Four of the character skill lists are still in Japanese
-Several skill lists can't scroll to the final page
-Some things are untranslated, such as the save and loading prompts, and the Score page
-I would probably prefer the character win cards to have their English names, but they won't display without an edit to the main binary. Honestly, the Japaense ones look better, at the wins, and during the versus section. English was a real afterthought for the original version of this game.
-Completely blocking the crash during single player when picking Gaoh would be best, but it's mostly prevented right now so that it's difficult to get yourself into that situation, at least.
-Flipping the X and O buttons wouldn't be bad.

Why the black bars on the side of the screen whenever in gameplay?
The original Neo Geo display resolution was 304 x 224. Outside of that would be what is typically considered the overscan area which games would use for sprite fill, and populating the screen before actually drawing it to the main player view. On Neo Geo, this was typically the left side of the screen, and on real hardware, if you expose that part of the screen, most game will be showing junk, populating and unpopulting sprites, etc.
In emulation, this is typically not an issue, as even MAME will do things to display things nicely on the edge (either filling out side of that or just rnederign faster, or increasign the sprite limit, etc.).
SSV on PS2 is sort of a partial emulation, where the 68k code is being emualted, and the rest is ported over to the PS2. I wanted to check to see if perhaps the sprite rending handled more like MAME, and removing the black bars was actually fairly trivial (a simple edit to the main PS2 binary).
However, upon doing so, I found that they were actually rendering the left side of the screen accurately, and the sprites were flickerign in and out of existence as they scrolled, which was quite distracting. The right side was fine, but leaving jsut the right side exposed would also be fairly distractign and uneven, so it seemed best to just leave the black bars on.


How to install:
It's an xDelta, so just use your favorite xDelta patcher (like xDeltaUI), and apply it to a redump verified version of Samurai Spirits Zero (JPN). All good.

The future of this:
I will probably never do any additional work to this, so if someone has some good ideas about changing or editing things (fixing some stuff to be better even), feel free, I won't take it personally.