Spirit Master, 3D fighter from Probe for PSX

[nem]

There is very little known about this fighter from Acclaim London Studios (formerly known as Probe Software Inc.). It appeared at the 1997 ECTS in London but the project was scrapped. Spirit Master was programmed by George Allan, famous for Commodore 64 and Amiga games, most notably Zool.

More from PlayStation museum.

Anyway, I accidentally stumbled upon the work of a graphics designer for the game. His site is here. What's interesting though is that he actually has a beta of the game downloadable on his site!

Since his site is bandwitdh limited, I have also uploaded the iso (as a zip) on my webspace. I have no means of testing this, so let me know if it works!

Edited some links!

[APE]

Gotta be made into an ISO somehow. I'll try it later after I do some research.

[karsten]

Anyone got it working? I've created an ISO out of the files (correct format, of course, also replaced the first 16 sectors with those from a real US disc), but the game always tries to access sectors outside the data track, which will make it crash... :-(

probably is seeks for audio tracks.... try to put some dummy ones in the disc 12-24 should be enough for being safe

[APE]

Are you using an emulator or actual hardware? Thrill Kill for example refuses to run on 99% of emulator configurations. Don't know why offhand but it runs wonderfully on actual hardware.

[n-y-n]

Well i tried it too without much luck. I just burned all files to a cd (low speed, DAO). In the emulator (ePSXe) i just get a black screen.

I also tried it in 2 TEST ps2's. There it got recognised as a PSX disc apperantly, since i got the sound it normally makes when it loads a PSX disc and the words "PlayStation" . However it was missing the PSX-logo, and also no (c) SCEE letters or anything; just PlayStation on screen. After that just a black screen.

[APE]

I've got a modded psone I need to try it on. Just gotta get around to making the iso.

[Blur2040]

I have a Blue PSOne debugger if anybody thinks that would work any better...

I could give it a try this weekend.

[DooV]

Same here, I did the iso using Sony´s PSX CDgen properly, but all I got was a black screen.

I know I can get stdout from the executable by launching the game with caetla and my Psx connected to my PC, but I don´t have the free time to test it...and maybe that won´t help anyway.

[n-y-n]

I thought i'd figure i just mail the guy and ask him how to get it working. So... if he answers i'll post it here.

[n-y-n]

He mailed back (quick too!) Here is the reply:

Hi,

I have only ever used it on modded ps1, I have never tried it with my matrix
modded ps2slim, but I could definitely give it a go. Since the game is very
much WIP, I can not give you any guarantee that it will work on an emulator.
It seems that this far no one in the forum has tried it on an old, modded
playstation. If you do but it does not work, I can try to dump the files
again- but please also remember that the disc must be 700mb big- bigger cd
disc formats definitely do not work.

I could have made an ISO as well, that I didn't was just pure laziness..
sorry about that.

game should take around 2-3 minutes to load, no other extra wizardry should
be needed. playability is pretty bad, so I'm not sure if it's worth for
anything else except pretty textures

I'm hoping to get more complete copy of the game some day.

MR

[DooV]

Many Psx game had check routines so if a file wasn´t in the expected sector location the game stopped to load. Maybe that´s the case (in addition to missing audio and/or XA tracks).

XA tracks can´t be copyed by simply dragging the files from the explorer.

He need to make a proper Psx ISO (that´s 2336/XA iso with CDRWin)

[oceanfr]

Hm does the psx museum guy have a more complete version or hes playing the same game spiritmaster.zip? and howd he get it to work??

[nem]

I'm sure the beta the guy from PlayStation Museum has played is a different one.

Shame noone has gotten this one to work :-(

[Toe]

It really is a shame... But I guess DooV is right, I tried it on both my old first generation PlayStation and my PS2 slim - both modchipped - and nothing worked.

[PS_Monitor]

I was surfing around and found video of this game on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS-x7ipLKIY

Maybe you guys already knew this.

Edit: I clicked on more of this guy's videos and he has some wicked stuff!

[Yakumo]

THanks for the video link. Just looking at the game it's not hard to see why it never came out. Looks like it plays like another Criticom.

Yakumo