Son Shu Shi is a game that nearly never was. Although released on the Atari ST, the Amiga version was previewed and reviewed in magazines but never appeared. What happened to it?

The authors were originally tracked down a few years ago and asked if they still had the game. However the source code and binaries had been destroyed some months earlier. This unfortunate fact was reported in issue 1 of Amiga Point of View magazine in a news article on unreleased games.

Luckily, a friend of the developers was reading that issue. Patrick Tamine was helping to get Son Shu Shi released at the time and still possessed a two disk runtime version. A backup was required but the disks were protected. The SPS (then CAPS) team were contacted.

Patrick used the SPS dumping tool to create raw disk images and sent them on to Kieron Wilkinson. István Fábián analysed the raw data and although an error existed on a track he was able to recover the data and produce working IPF images (which are usable with the WinUAE emulator).

Using these IPF images, Codetapper produced a WHDLoad hard disk install for use with real Amigas (or indeed WinUAE).