leonardoliveira & Idc's clean decrypted roms

[Shou]

Any chance you'll be able to do Powered Gear Japan soon?

[leonardoliveira]

Any chance you'll be able to do Powered Gear Japan soon?

I'll have a look at it. It's a interesting game of course.

[dbstallman]

I'll add a vote for Powered Gear as well. That is an awesome game.

Brian.

[Spectre]

Edit: I believe Leo has fixed it. ROM available on the site has been updated accordingly.

Waiting anxiously on feedback about this one ...

Like I mentioned earlier I mostly decrypted games I would use the roms myself and the ones done for others may be untested.

Will test the new version as soon as I get a chance, thanks to both of you for your hard work as always

[Spectre]

Mighty Pang now working

[frsj8112]

Like I asked before, please do the US version of dd2

[Spectre]

Like I asked before, please do the US version of dd2

You could try this with the usa phoenix set;
http://www.jammarcade.net/cps2-dephoenix/

[idc]

Like I asked before, please do the US version of dd2

You could try this with the usa phoenix set;
http://www.jammarcade.net/cps2-dephoenix/

it appears that this tool breaks the ROM test in the test menu, and doesn't set the game region correctly.

[porchio]

Yeah, it wasn't really meant to be used for much good really.
It was mainly wrote to teach myself programming and since I was messing with cps2 stuff at the time I thought it would be fun.
it just replaces the jump to that phoenix menu with the code that was originally there.

[Spectre]

A cool concept though, would effectively allow the phoenix edition sets to be "cleaned".

[porchio]

not quite. The main issue with phoenix sets is the alleged "unknown" changes that were apparently made.
My program worked fine for me but i only used it on a couple of sets i actually had hardware for. I wouldnt really recommend anyone use it, especially not now there is a far better alternative

[leonardoliveira]

not quite. The main issue with phoenix sets (for me anyway) is the other unknown changes that were made. Whether these were intentional changes or not is another matter but the new decrypted roms are far nicer, and free too

My program worked fine for me but i only used it on a couple of sets i actually had hardware for. I wouldnt really recommend anyone use it, especially not now there is a far better alternative

Valiant effort, brother ! Don't go de-valuating your own effort. You did something good.

Here's a breakdown of the things Raz change on his sets (what makes a set Phoenix, not what it works on a dead board):

He replace the 68000 exception vectors with pointers which point to his "Phoenix debugger" screen.
He replace one of the encryption watchdog kick instructions with a jump for his "Phoenix splash" screen right before the game kicks onto it's main loop, but after it's done with RAM test.
He fixes the checksums for all the chips he changed from the original set on the memory test screen.

"De-Phoenixing" a ROM would involve dumping the decrypted memory for the matching set on MAME, pair it with Raz ROM and undo all his changes which regard to "Phoenix" differentiation without undoing the changes needed to make the game work.

The only thing you might have a bit of trouble with is fixing the ROM checksums.

[porchio]

I made that program quite a while ago now (06/02/2011 according to Windows timestamp). I since learned how to decrypt my own ROMs to some degree using the method that compares to another set but different region. It worked well but obviously there are limitations. The checksum thing didn't even enter my head at the time but its easy enough to find with the MAME debugger.

Didn't mean to de-value my work, I was proud of it when I made it. It was my first attempt at C++ programming then this Windows GUI was my first attempt at VB. Both worked well for me and served their purpose.
Your decryption efforts though render it obsolete.

[leonardoliveira]

I made that program quite a while ago now (06/02/2011 according to Windows timestamp). I since learned how to decrypt my own ROMs to some degree using the method that compares to another set but different region. It worked well but obviously there are limitations. The checksum thing didn't even enter my head at the time but its easy enough to find with the MAME debugger.

That method of comparing two sets of same version with a different region is what me and idc have been calling "xor clash" attack. It usually results on byte perfect clean roms that are perfectly bug-less.

An game that can be easily used to test the concept is Pocket Fighter/Super Gem Fighter.

[porchio]

That's one of the ones I did, the other were 1944 and SFZ2.
I dont own much cps2 stuff anymore but it was good fun messing around with stuff.

[VectorGlow]

Raz has commented on his Phoenix code, etc:

http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showthrea ... ost3505645"

[Spectre]

[idc]

[SuperPang]

I must admit that I do agree with Raz that all hacked hardware should have some way of identifying it as such on boot. The only reason not to do that is because you want to pretend to someone that it's legit. Even if that someone is yourself, it's asking for trouble when you sell it.

[Rossyra]