I own an original Japanese cartridge of Shock Troopers (or at least it came with Japanese label and Japanese mini-marquee...), and it boots up as set 2.
This reminds me that there's an episode of Game Center CX where Arino plays Shock Troopers outside a convenience store. It's definitely the 3 lives version.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnf030 ... ulgccx_fun (approx 13:30 into it, poor cabinet had broken buttons...)
Therefore I don't think you can say that Set 1 is "Japanese only" when clearly Set 2 got distribution in Japan as well.
However, looking at scans of a Neo-Geo Freak article about the game:
http://bbh.marpirc.net/shock/ngf1.jpg
There is no "HERO" counter on the character select, and the other screenshot clearly shows the grayed out character icon boxes that only appear in Set 1. This seems to lend credence to the theory that Set 1 is an earlier revision of the game, as they would need the earliest possible version of the game to be able to take all those screenshots in time for the article. So of course it's possible this version was made available in Japan as well. The other reason I believe Set 2 to be a later and more common revision is based on the serial numbers on the cartridges - I've owned two English copies of the game with serial numbers 10883 and 11640, which would definitely be later in the production run. (The Japanese cartridge doesn't have a serial number for some reason)
The official flyer distributed for the game is even more baffling:
http://bbh.marpirc.net/shock/flyer2.jpg
Going by the character icons at the top you can see that screenshots 1 and 2 are of Set 2, but the third screenshot has the grayed out icons of Set 1! Bizarre.
As to where the rom dumps originated from, I know that Set 1 was originally dumped by ROMLIST, which I believe were two guys based out of Sweden? Where they got their cartridge from is anyone's guess, but chances are it was a European distributor. I made a thread a while back on the Neo-Geo forums asking if anyone had actually played Set 1 in an arcade, and someone mentioned that they specifically remember playing it at an arcade in Italy... so maybe this version did get some sort of European distribution...?!
So after all this time, we still don't have a concrete answer as to why there's two different versions of the game, and where they originated from. Yes I do think it's important that a distinction be made between scores done on Set 1 and Set 2, since more points are possible on Set 2 through suiciding team members to gain additional time. But by the same token, I don't see why JKP-ACE's score should automatically be classified as "Set 1" when we have no proof of what version of the game he played. A timeframe of June 1998 doesn't make things any clearer - Set 2 of the game was definitely around in arcades way before then. I distinctly remember the first time I played Shock Troopers in an arcade called Diversions in San Antonio, Texas in February 1998, and it was most definitely Set 2. Unless you have some other proof of what version he played, but I don't think anyone was taking down this information since barely anybody knew there were two different versions of the game back then...
also the info you put about my score is wrong. It's Jungle -> Valley, not Jungle -> Mountain
