True. I doubt it'll happen, but I wish a crafty hacker would merge Special and Perfect together, to keep the best aspects of both games.
I didn't understand so well, but it seemed that code was lost/locked, or they'd go under law problems, but the fact is SNK wasn't interested about reopening and actually complete the original SS0SP, just took what they had from posterior tests and used it. I personally can't find this as a professional product fron where it comes (no mention about how bad SSNGCOL online gaming was, at release date).
Supposedly the fatalities were cut down from Perfect due to ROM space reasons, but I bet it'd still be possible to fit everything in a single ROM with smart space management and/or compression.
In fact it seems that the main reason was what happened in Jun 01/2004, when a girl was killed with a knife at a school in Japan, but I haven't find info about what happened with releases that included fatalities, probably those versions were already for sale when that happened, and posterior tests for "Perfect" (or what should be its real name,"Special Final Edition") had to be deleted to avoid problems.
About my earlier post, this is the logo I was talking about, looks more suited to what release should be... A "Special - Final Edition" suits far better. even its colors.
However, at the other side( USA) I sincerely hate what they did with that "Perfect" logo, those fonts don't even pair with the style of the entire emblem. If I were a hacker, I'd try to use Epic Games SSVP (JAP) game logo and would try to use it as a base for both, USA and JAP logos inside the ROM, that would be the actual logo update, instead to try to toy with that "perfect" logo which by far looks like a label put quicky to make hype.
Ah, also would be good to keep in mind that this build hasn't that man's voice telling "Samurai Shodown Special" when USA logo appears.