Undumped Garou AES cart.

Razoola

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At the anual Finnish NeoGeo meet tonight we have confirmed there is an original undumped AES version of Garou in the wild. To know if you have the undumped version the first reported CRC32 (ROM region) in the unibios check will be 0x2E849FE2. Examining the data (with PC-2-NEO) shows the SMA chip data matches the MVS version of the game, as does the banking ports.

Unfortunately the owner of this cart does not want it to be opened but we have at minimum been able to confirm the cart is legit and will pass the unibios cheak in the next release (he was worried about it given the CRC32 fails). I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this cart is the result of SNK using MVS stock parts to build AES stock.

I'm not sure if this is going to be a difference between English and Japanese builds of the cart but looking the data it is almost identical to the dumped AES version bar alterations to values written to the banking ports. Given this missing CRC has not been brought to my attention in the past, I have a feeling this AES version is really quite rare.

It would be great to get it dumped and I guess it will only be the P ROMs that are needed. Anyone out there got one that can be dumped?
 
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kuze

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Can't the program rom be dumped without opening the cart? E.g. via pc2neo?
 

Razoola

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Unfortunately not. While I could get non encrypted P ROM data and confirm the SMA data, the ROM dumps themselves will be encrypted.
 

ForeverSublime

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Do I read correct that an added benefit of Unibios is that it can tell you whether you have an unknown version of a game by if it fails bootup?
 

Razoola

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Do I read correct that an added benefit of Unibios is that it can tell you whether you have an unknown version of a game by if it fails bootup?

Yes thats right, I think it has found about 10 undumped NeoGeo games in the past that have since been collected. Just because a game fails does not garantee its undumped mind, it can also mean you have a faulty cart. I think there are still a few known unpumped neogeo varients out there (no including prototypes).
 

kuze

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Unfortunately not. While I could get non encrypted P ROM data and confirm the SMA data, the ROM dumps themselves will be encrypted.

Ahh too bad. Wouldn't MAME be able to decrypt the encrypted data? Might as well get the encrypted data now & maybe it can be decrypted later.
 
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Razoola

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Ahh too bad. Wouldn't MAME be able to decrypt the encrypted data?

Decrypting it will be easy and the chances are it will match either the MVS or AES decryption of the game already. When it comes to MAME though, they are not going to settle for anything other than dumps of the physical ROMs including the encryption,
 

Razoola

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This one has been preserved now.
 
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