Vampire Savior Recomp

[!IMPORTANT] This project has moved to CPS-2 Recomp, together with the other CPS-2 ports: one download and one launcher for every game, with the settings they share set once for all of them. Vampire Savior is here, and new releases are on its releases page. Your settings, save states and the ROM set you chose carry over. This repository and its releases stay as they were, and get no more changes.

An unofficial native PC port of the arcade game Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire (Capcom, 1997, CPS-2 board) for macOS, Linux (Steam Deck included) and Windows, made by static recompilation, with a full training mode.

Get started: download it and play →

Beta. The game plays from start to ending and its code is checked instruction by instruction, but it has been played on few machines and controllers yet. Expect rough edges, and please report what you find.

No game files are included. You need your own copy of the game: the arcade ROM set vsavj (Japan, 970519) with its key file, from a board you own. Only that version works: the sets of other regions and revisions (vsav, vsavu, vsava, vsavh and the rest) do not. This project cannot help you get one.

This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Capcom. Vampire Savior and Darkstalkers are trademarks of Capcom Co., Ltd.

New: dress the characters in your own colours

A colour editor in the game, with the character in front of you: any of their ten colour sets, 16 levels each of red, green and blue, random colours at the press of a button, and PalMod's colours too. Then choose the character with that button and fight in them. More, with a video →

What it is

The game's 68000 program is translated ahead of time into C++ and compiled into the port, and the parts that features touch (the camera, the stages, hit tests, the fight's rules: 123 routines so far) are rewritten by hand as readable C++. What the program expects of the board (its video, the QSound chip, the sound CPU and its registers) is code written for this project, not an emulator (how it works).

• Plays with a keyboard, a gamepad or an arcade stick; every key and button can be changed, for each player, in the launcher.
• An in-game menu (Esc or F1; on a gamepad, the left stick's click or Start and Select together) with the training mode and the other modes, save states, speed, the cheats and every feature.
• The picture your way (Display page): sharp, whole pixels or smooth; 4:3, square pixels or the whole screen; and the window's size.
• Pure plays exactly as the board does. Enhanced (the default) adds free play and your own character colours. Every other feature is a switch of its own.
• The board's operator settings (difficulty, attack power, timer speed, game speed and the rest) on the Board page (launcher's Features, in-game menu), each as the board is set unless you choose; or the game's own test menu from the in-game menu.
• A search box on the launcher's Features page (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) finds any feature by a word in its name, description or choices.
• Your ROM set is only ever read. Settings, save states and the board's settings memory go in your own user folder.

Training mode

"Alternative modes" at the top of the in-game menu has a Training mode page: Start goes straight to the character choice with two players and into a fight with no clock that nobody loses, and the page holds the aids below.

Feature	What it does
Hit boxes	The boxes the game itself tests: where a player can be hit (blue), attacks (red; orange for things thrown), and the boxes that keep the players apart (green)
Frame data and frame meter	Startup, active and recovery of each move and the advantage after a hit or a guarded hit, counted in the game's own steps; a row of coloured cells for each player, one a step
Input display	What each player presses and for how long, the stick as a keypad number
Combo readout	Hits, damage, how much is lost for good and how much comes back, the round's best
Health refills	A player's health comes back when they have not been hit for a moment
The dummy	Stands, crouches, jumps; guards (always, after a hit, at random; high or low as each attack needs); pushes away or guard cancels; softens throws; gets up where it fell or rolls towards or away; records and replays in three slots (one, or any at random), and can answer with a recording after guarding or being hit
Start over	The round as it began, in the middle or a corner, sides swapped or not (Backspace, or a gamepad's left shoulder)
Stage	Any of the twelve stages, or the game's own choice
Stop, step, slow	Stop the game, go on one frame at a time, or play at a half, a quarter or an eighth of the speed (anywhere, not only in training)

Also: save states in nine slots, free play, and a few cheats (no damage, one-hit knockouts, full gauge, infinite time). docs/FEATURES.md has the whole list.

Alternative modes

The in-game menu's first row, "Alternative modes", has ways of playing and watching the game that the board does not have. Each has a page with a Start row and its own choices, and runs until another is started or the menu's Reset.

Mode	What it does
Training mode	A fight with no clock that nobody loses, and the aids above
Attract mode	The game's own show on a loop, as a cabinet left alone plays it, with no coin to keep out: everything, the introduction only, or its eight demonstration fights one after another
Stage viewer	Any of the twelve stages with nobody on it and no panel, its own pieces moving and its music playing (or another stage's). Scroll it with the stick, or let it drift from end to end. "Infinite" is all twelve in turn, each scrolling into the next as its tune fades into the next one's
Model viewer	One character by itself, on a stage or on plain white or black, from a quarter of its size to 25 times. It stands and moves with your controls, or goes through any of its animations (named A0, B12, C3... as the game's own lists number them; left and right step through them), at full speed or in slow motion. At its own size, what the stage has in front of the fighters stays in front (or, with "Stage in front" off, behind it)
Survival	One opponent after another on the health you have left. How many can you beat?
Endless battle	Two fighters the game plays, for as long as you like, with no bars and no clock, on one stage, on stages that fade one into another, or on a floor that scrolls through them all. Touch the controls to take a fighter over
Ring out	No health. Knock your opponent over the end of the stage and jump down to the next one
Colour editor	Change a character's colours while you watch: custom colours

Widescreen

A switch on the launcher's first page, under "Full screen" (and on the in-game menu's Display page). Fights are shown and played in 16:9: the picture is 512 columns wide where the board's is 384, at the same height and with everything the same size, so there is a third more of the stage in view.

It is off unless you switch it on, in every preset, because it changes how the game plays:

• The players can go to the wide picture's edges, so they can stand further apart than on the board (464 at most, where the board allows 336). The stage's own ends are where they were.
• The camera stops 64 short of where it did, so that the picture ends where the stage does.
• A stage's own pieces and things thrown are kept while they are in the wide picture, not only the board's. (Some pieces still come in a little late at the wide picture's edge, and at the very ends of a stage a few columns of the planes behind are not painted: see the roadmap.)
• The bars, the clock and the gauges stay in the middle. Survival, the endless battle, the ring out and the stage viewer are wide too. Everything that is not a fight keeps the board's 4:3.

With it off the game is exactly the board's. Nothing here stretches the picture: the extra columns are the game's own stage, drawn by the port from what the game already has.

Invisible walls, on the Display page (launcher's Features, in-game menu), keeps the 16:9 picture and plays the game exactly as the board does: the players are stopped where the board's picture ends, by walls that are not seen, the camera goes as far as the board's, and the stage's pieces and things thrown are kept as on the board. Near a stage's end the view stays on the stage, so the play area is then to one side of the wide picture. The game's memory is the same as with widescreen off, frame for frame (make check-widescreen compares it along the ladder). Pieces of a stage that the board draws only once they are in its own picture can come in at the play area's edge rather than the picture's.

Custom colours

Give any character colours of your own: change them in the game's colour editor, or bring the ones you have made with PalMod.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/bb498cab-aac9-4e74-94a5-6c4f0d958ff6

Morrigan in eighteen sets of colours made with the editor:

The colour editor is on the in-game menu's "Alternative modes" page. It shows the character with a panel at the right, worked with player 1's controls: up and down choose a row, left and right change it.

• Character, background, size, animation: who you are dressing, on what, how large, standing or going through one of their animations.
• Set: which of the character's ten colour sets, by how it is chosen at the character choice: LP, MP, HP, LK, MK, HK, two punches together (PP), two kicks together (KK), and the two used with auto guard.
• Line: the character's own colours, or one of three lines for their effects. Choosing a line shows the animation that uses it most, for the characters that keep all four lines on show (Bulleta, Victor, Morrigan, Anakaris and Q-Bee; it is found in the first few seconds the editor shows a character). The others' extra lines are seen only when an effect needs them.
• Colour, Red, Green, Blue: one of the line's 15 colours (it blinks on the character when you choose it), and its red, green and blue in the board's 16 levels each.
• Random colours: every colour of the set at random, at a second press on its row (LK, left or right, twice), so that one press by mistake loses nothing. HK puts back the colours from before the random ones, until the next change.
• Save set and Load: keep a set you like in the character's library and put it back later, into this set or any other (a design made on LP can go on KK). Left and right on Load try each saved one on the character; LP loads it, MK twice deletes it, and moving off the row without loading puts your colours back.
• LP copies a colour, MP pastes it, HP gives back the game's; the menu page puts back the game's colours for the whole set or the whole character.

Changes show at once and are saved as you go. To play in them, choose the character with the button of the set you changed (Lilith with LP, say), anywhere: arcade, versus, training.

Files. What you change goes in a palettes folder beside settings.ini, a text file a character (Lilith.txt) holding only the sets that are not the game's. The folder is:

System	Folder
Windows	%APPDATA%\Vampire Savior\palettes (paste it into Explorer's address bar; it is the AppData\Roaming folder in your user folder)
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/Vampire Savior/palettes
Linux, SteamOS	~/.local/share/Vampire Savior/palettes

You can write or share them by hand: "Write the game's colours" (on the colour editor's page of the menu) puts every character's own colours in palettes/original to start from, and docs/FEATURES.md has the format. Saved sets are files too, one a set, in palettes/library/<Character>/ (Lilith 1.txt, Lilith 2.txt...): to share a design, share its file, and to use one someone gave you, put it in that folder.

PalMod. Colours made with PalMod, the community's palette editor, work too: edit a copy of your set's vm3j.10b with it (never the one in your ROM set) and put the copy in palettes. The characters' colours it changed are used, their effects' too (poisoned, burned and the like); anything else in that file is left as the game's, so it cannot change how the game plays. Text files go over it.

"Load colour files again", on the same page, reads files you changed while the game runs. "Custom colours" on the Display page switches all of it: on in Enhanced (it changes nothing until there are files), off in Pure.

What you need

• The ROM set vsavj (Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire, Japan 970519): vsavj.zip (with vsav.zip beside it if your collection keeps the shared files there) or a folder with the set's files, including vsavj.key. The launcher checks every file by checksum and tells you which is missing or different. Sets of other regions and revisions are refused: the port is made from this one version's program, and its training features use addresses found in it.
• One of: macOS 13 or later (Apple silicon or Intel); Linux x86_64 or SteamOS; Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
• A gamepad or stick with six buttons is recommended.

Playing

1. Download the build for your system from the releases page and unpack it.
2. Open the launcher (Vampire Savior Recomp.app, vampire_savior-launcher) and drop your ROM set on it, or choose it. It stays where it is.
3. Press Play.

While playing, Esc or F1 (on a gamepad, the left stick's click, or Start and Select together) opens the in-game menu. The launcher's Controllers page changes any key or button, for each player, and lists the other keys. Only the menu's "Quit game" row (or closing the window) ends the game.

macOS: the app is not notarized, so the first time, right-click it and choose Open. Linux: unpack the archive anywhere and run vampire_savior-launcher. Windows: run vampire_savior-launcher.exe. Opening vampire_savior.exe by itself starts the launcher too (straight into the game once a ROM set has been chosen).

Steam Deck

1. Hold the power button and choose Switch to Desktop.
2. Download VampireSavior-linux-x86_64.tar.gz from the releases page. In the file manager (Dolphin), right-click it and choose Extract → Extract archive here, then move the VampireSavior folder where it can stay (for example a new Applications folder in your home folder). If you move it later, do step 5 again.
3. Copy your ROM set (vsavj.zip with its key file, or its folder) onto the Deck, for example from a USB stick or the SD card.
4. In the VampireSavior folder, open vampire_savior-launcher and choose your ROM set (or drop it on the window).
5. On the launcher's Game page, press Add to Steam. It adds two entries to your library: Vampire Savior (straight into the game) and Vampire Savior Launcher (the ROM set, features and controls).
6. Go back to Gaming Mode with the Return to Gaming Mode icon on the desktop. Both are in your Library under Non-Steam.

In the game, click the left stick, or press View and Menu together (the two buttons either side of the screen's top), to open the in-game menu; its "Quit game" row ends the game.

Building from source

With your own ROM set in rom/ (ignored by Git), CMake, Ninja, SDL 3 and Python 3:

make            # twice the first time
make explore    # once, about ten minutes: finds the game's code by made-up play and translates it
make run

docs/BUILDING.md has every platform, the checks and the release builds.

Feedback and contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md for the rules (above all: nothing from the game, ever) and docs/ROADMAP.md for what is next.

License and credits

GPL-3.0-only (see LICENSE). THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md lists what comes from other projects: the CPS-2 program cipher is MAME's (BSD-3-Clause; worked out by Andreas Naive and Nicola Salmoria), the QSound model follows MAME's high-level one (superctr, Valley Bell), the hardware facts follow MAME's CPS-2 driver, and the launcher's look comes from arelkair's wiiparty-recomp. SDL 3, Dear ImGui and the Inter font are used by the programs.

The repository holds no game data and nothing derived from it.