I kind of forgot about all this until I played a 2nd impact machine a few times week. It's been cracked and emulated for years but that doesn't really reveal any in depth info on how the cart functions. MAME doesn't emulate the cart SH2 / has no need to. It just decrypts the BIOS at driver init and that's enough to get the mainboard SH2 up and running it seems. The cart SH2 supposedly has some role in this but the decryption info in MAME driver along with what I see in google is very vague. Can't seem to find any info on the exact dependencies the mainboard has on the cart SH2.
I know that Guru already tried using regular SH2 with decrypted BIOS code with no success. One of the first things I saw Warzard do is test that decryption is actually active. It would crash on a regular SH2 running a pre-decrypted BIOS since it's written in a way that relies on decryption happening at runtime. A regular SH2 won't work, although removing this check is trivial along with others like it. I'm sure there's alot more to it than that though.
so has anyone actually taken any notes on the cart / slot that aren't published anywhere? I wouldn't mind owning one of these when all this suicide stuff is dealt with, but it looks like there's no progress on this at all from what I see in Google.
I know that Guru already tried using regular SH2 with decrypted BIOS code with no success. One of the first things I saw Warzard do is test that decryption is actually active. It would crash on a regular SH2 running a pre-decrypted BIOS since it's written in a way that relies on decryption happening at runtime. A regular SH2 won't work, although removing this check is trivial along with others like it. I'm sure there's alot more to it than that though.
so has anyone actually taken any notes on the cart / slot that aren't published anywhere? I wouldn't mind owning one of these when all this suicide stuff is dealt with, but it looks like there's no progress on this at all from what I see in Google.