If it was about matching the arcade while working with the SNES lower horizontal resolution, and there wasn't any need for the black bars [forced blank] in order to run the game without any display and/or slowdown issues and the like, wouldn't they have been better doing something like this on SNES then:
- Squished.png (62.27 KiB) Viewed 802 times
(evenly pre-squish the visuals to SNES 256 horizontal resolution, losing a little bit of the pixel detail horizontally and touching up any pixels where necessary to make everything still look as nice as possible)
And then letting the 4:3 stretch make it look like this:
- Stretched.png (67.09 KiB) Viewed 802 times
(the 4:3 stretches them out to the correct proportions again, with that little bit of loss in horizontal pixel detail but generally everything still looking lovely, and the same FOV is maintained as well)
At least I think that could have worked, where it would have looked about as good in terms of the slightly reduced pixel detail that they would have inevitably ended up with via either solution on SNES (don't they already pre-squish the visuals horizontally on the SNES versions of Street Fighter II anyway), and also not had any black bars.
Or, when making the art for the SNES version, just [re]draw everything with the 256 8:7 PAR already stretched to the 256 4:3 PAR, assuming some graphics software or display at the time allowed such a thing, and it would look as close to the arcade as possible but just with slightly less pixel detail on the horizontal axis.
If that were possible, and maintaining the arcade graphic's proportions as closely as possible was a priority, I think that's the solution I would have went for here personally.
Edit: I removed a paragraph about
not pre-squishing the backgrounds along with the sprites, which I'd added later as an edit, as that wouldn't actually look correct and was just undermining my original point above.