Arcade Otaku - アーケード オタク

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: Artemio Urbina, Ian Court and Eduardo Cruz, 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 Schütz, François Lefebvre, Tormod Tjaberg, Felix Vazquez and Pau Oliva.

Impressive stuff. It'd be about 17-18 years since I was uploading CPS2 stuff to geoshock,

I'm guessing this now enables bit-perfect conversions?

cools wrote:I'm guessing this now enables bit-perfect conversions?

Yes. Whether or not the community regards that as good bad is, of course, open to debate. In any case, dead boards can now be restored - the "correct" way - which can only be a good thing.

Boards can be converted back into originals

Original labels now most valuable part of CPS2 hardware o/

Enhorabuena!

Congratulations

Do you know personally Pau Olive?

Is a very nice friend of mine

Excellent news and congratulation to the whole team - really stunning work!

Fantastic news Unless this implementation makes use of the battery, surely it would make sense for all CPS2 B boards to under go this process.

Congratulations to the team, I can't begin to imagine the amount of work that has been put into this (and the CPS1 project as well).

Thanks to all for your comments.

pulstar wrote:Fantastic news Unless this implementation makes use of the battery, surely it would make sense for all CPS2 B boards to under go this process.

It does involve the use of the battery. It writes the keys to a dead/blank board in the same manner that Capcom did.

It may make further research, and hence other cool stuff, possible/easier.

Kabuki, CPS1 QSound and CPS2 down. What next?

CV1000

idc wrote:Thanks to all for your comments.

pulstar wrote:Fantastic news Unless this implementation makes use of the battery, surely it would make sense for all CPS2 B boards to under go this process.

It does involve the use of the battery. It writes the keys to a dead/blank board in the same manner that Capcom did.

I can see a drought of batteries from RS etc soon

idc wrote:It may make further research, and hence other cool stuff, possible/easier.

Kabuki, CPS1 QSound and CPS2 down. What next?

Whatever it is, I can't wait

cools wrote:CV1000

That would be as easy as jtag + rewrite. It's just not documented perfectly (yet).

I've no idea how often you can rewrite those chips on the board. Maybe a small daughterboard would sort that.

idc wrote:Kabuki, CPS1 QSound and CPS2 down. What next?

Try to crack the SuNA protection before they're all stone dead.

Awesome work to all those involved!

idc wrote:Kabuki, CPS1 QSound and CPS2 down. What next?

Creating CPLD replacement chips for the CPS1 a-board and c-board PPUs

Well done to all! I know there's other stuff other than Capcom but can't help feel CPSIII is coming.

Excellent work, congrats!

Well done guys

Best news so far this year.

Starks out...

))))))))))))

Great news.

Another milestone of reverse engineering.

Bloody brilliant work from all involved.

Can't wait to read all the gritty technical details, amazing work