Important Capcom CPS2 Announcement

Artemio

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Dear colleagues,

It is our pleasure to announce a very important milestone in arcade conservation, the successful reverse engineering of Capcom's CPS2 security programming. A major development giving full hardware control of this popular platform over to the community, and helping preservation by enabling the clean desuicide and restoration of any dead games without hardware modifications.

This achievement has been made possible thanks to the help, support and collaboration of many dedicated individuals who just like you have an altruistic passion about arcade games, their hardware, history and legacy. All the discoveries and results generated by this project will be soon shared publicly, free of charge.

Over the coming days the project will see a limited release to selected testers to help ensure maturity before the public disclosure happens.

Stay tuned to further details.

The ArcadeHacker project
http://arcadehacker.blogspot.com


CPS2 project credit goes to: Eduardo Cruz, Ian Court and Artemio Urbina, with the key collaboration of Digshadow, Ougun, Brizzo, Rockman, Tayoken, and the valuable donations by Juan Felix, Alberto Fuentes, Alex Cmaylo, Bill de Leo, Alexander Sch?z, Fran?is Lefebvre, Tormod Tjaberg, Felix Vazquez and Pau Oliva.
 

kuze

Akari's Big Brother
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Very cool, Artemio! It seems like just yesterday Eduardo started the CPS2 project and now it's already completed. It's incredible that you guys have already solved the puzzle on restoring the keys to dead boards. I look forward to reading the blog posts on arcadehacker regarding the process.
 

wyo

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Very exciting news! Thanks for all your hard work :)
 

aha2940

AH, A, COLUMBIAN!,
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This is indeed very nice news, thanks everybody for the hard work :)
 

ballzdeepx

Rugal's Secretary
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This is awesome, I'm very interested to see the details.
Thanks in advance for the dedication and for sharing how to help preserve these games.
 

Razoola

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Great stuff, its finally happened. I see C Urbina is mentioned, he had the official Capcom restoration kits.

Heh, silly me, I see Artemio made the original post.
Well done sir.
 
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ECZangief

The Real Al Bundy
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Cool! Im sure we will see many RARE Original Battery Blue Progear boards for sell in the near future. Hurray!


Cheers.
 

GutsDozer

Robot Master., Master Tasuke, Eat Your, Heart Out
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Holy shit!!!!! Immortality!!!!!! Great work guys!!!

highlander.gif
 

Artemio

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Thanks for your kind comments.

Great stuff, its finally happened. I see C Urbina is mentioned, he had the official Capcom restoration kits.

Heh, silly me, I see Artemio made the original post.
Well done sir.

Thanks a lot Raz, your work has always been an inspiration for me.

Regarding the Capcom stuff, I only had the cards and PDA, the contents only lead to information already in MAME: the keys themselves.
 

Niko

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Wow this is awesome! Thanks for sharing this with the public!
 

Razoola

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Yes it means just that. Board brought back to life the way Capcom do it (board will suicide again once the battery dies). It means people will now be able to bring back board to a set revision that does not have a phoenix edition for example. Also means if you own the hardware to do this you have access to all sets in MAME.

Im guessing someone may make a new multidevice using this to support all games though I am not sure how long the official reprogramming takes. It might still be faster to use the method I suggested of holding an encrypted and decrypted program ROMs together. Darksoft missed out big time not doing that with his device and severly limited the games his device could play compared to the games available. Im guessing this news might make darksofts CPS2 device obsolete and I would not be surprised if he does not make a new version if no one else does it first.
 

Zangrief

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Jun 10, 2014
Posts
302
Yes it means just that. Board brought back to life the way Capcom do it (board will suicide again once the battery dies). It means people will now be able to bring back board to a set revision that does not have a phoenix edition for example. Also means if you own the hardware to do this you have access to all sets in MAME.

Im guessing someone may make a new multidevice using this to support all games though I am not sure how long the official reprogramming takes. It might still be faster to use the method I suggested of holding an encrypted and decrypted program ROMs together. Darksoft missed out big time not doing that with his device and severly limited the games his device could play compared to the games available. Im guessing this news might make darksofts CPS2 device obsolete and I would not be surprised if he does not make a new version if no one else does it first.

Anything to keep you slap-fighting, lightweight...
 

ResO

water damaged
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Rad, anybody want to sell me back my USA progear kit? (Didn't have matching serials)
 

leonk

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Yes it means just that. Board brought back to life the way Capcom do it (board will suicide again once the battery dies). It means people will now be able to bring back board to a set revision that does not have a phoenix edition for example. Also means if you own the hardware to do this you have access to all sets in MAME.

Im guessing someone may make a new multidevice using this to support all games though I am not sure how long the official reprogramming takes. It might still be faster to use the method I suggested of holding an encrypted and decrypted program ROMs together. Darksoft missed out big time not doing that with his device and severly limited the games his device could play compared to the games available. Im guessing this news might make darksofts CPS2 device obsolete and I would not be surprised if he does not make a new version if no one else does it first.

sill question(s) from someone new to CPS2:

1) Aren't the people that make $$$ doing Phoenix repairs also out of business now?
2) Is there something unique about what darksoft is doing that prevents him from doing a firmware update to do something like:
- load encypted ROMs into RAM
- read encyption key from encyption database file
- program encyption key into Z80
- start the game

Unless theres some sort of physical limitation (encypted ROM needs more space than on board or his FPGA doesnt have enough blocks for this new logic) Why cant this be done?

3) For Darksoft. does it matter? people that run his device, do they care about encypted/decypted? or are the encypted ROMs sonehow better?
 

Lemony Vengeance

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Yes it means just that. Board brought back to life the way Capcom do it (board will suicide again once the battery dies). It means people will now be able to bring back board to a set revision that does not have a phoenix edition for example. Also means if you own the hardware to do this you have access to all sets in MAME.

Im guessing someone may make a new multidevice using this to support all games though I am not sure how long the official reprogramming takes. It might still be faster to use the method I suggested of holding an encrypted and decrypted program ROMs together. Darksoft missed out big time not doing that with his device and severly limited the games his device could play compared to the games available. Im guessing this news might make darksofts CPS2 device obsolete and I would not be surprised if he does not make a new version if no one else does it first.

From IDC on the Arcade-projects forum:

Incidentally, a CPS2 Multi (proto 2) did play a part in this. I had it loaded with original encrypted Capcom ROM images on a board with a battery. I used it to test dozens of key loading attempts for various regional variants of many different games. All ran successfully.

Looks like the CPS2 multi was instrumental in making this happen much more quickly. Furthermore, mitsurugi has already confirmed that this announcement wont affect the use of the multiboard.
 
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