I’m one of the 4 people who donated the Japanese version of Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha to Razoola back in 2001 (My name is Johnick on the CPS2 Shock donators page). The game was almost 6 years old at the time which is about how long the batteries lasted in the board. If we didn’t donate it to Raz to dump and create the XOR tables back then it probably wouldn’t have been playable in emulators until 2016. Great vid, I have fond memories of the CPS2 days, Raz deliberately released the XOR tables for the oldest games first and staggered the releases so as not to hurt Capcoms sales, as they were still making CPS2 games at that time.
Mr T. Guru So Nebula could do this in 2007 ?, good to know, still at the time nobody knew this would be possible so we felt we had to donate the board before the battery died or potentially lose that version of the game forever.
I remember those days when I waited for Xor table to be released for a new old cps2 game. Now I even personally met the other half of cps2shock, CrashTest.
Greetings, I was one of the monetary donators to cps2shock back in the day. My name is "peace" on the name list page. I also donated Last Blade for the NeoGeo to NeoCharity during those times back then as well. So NaZ could dump it, and I even let him keep it as way of saying thank you for all hes done. Those were the golden years.
Hello, I am also one of the monetary donators to cps2shock back in the day. My name is "Jet" on the name list page. I donated Last Blade for the NeoGeo to NeoCharity during those times back then as well. So NaZ could dump it. Good times
Oh damn, is this about the Suicide Boards? I hope you follow this up with the decryption of the CPS3. That took forever to get done & we've only had real CPS3 emulation for a relatively short time in comparison.
The CPS3 was generally accepted as the best way to prevent anti encryption but there were several boards and chips (including the 45djp) the Sprite count caused this to expose certain exploits. The battery can be primed meaning no data is lost, being stored on the board.
Arcade boards are huge since after all arcade cabinets are the size of closets. So unlike with console or even pc motherboards there is no reason not to spread them out.
Copy protection is awesome! Copy protection techniques only arise because of people not abiding by the rules. In a perfect word (i.e. some mathematical worlds) copy protection is a non-factor.
My local pizza joint had a version of Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Edition bootleg running back in the 90s. At the time I had no idea it was a bootleg, I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but no one ever believed me when I would tell them about a version of SF2 that you could change characters with the start button, or do specials in mid air. It wasn't until recently I found out a slew of these bootlegs were released everywhere, and real.
the only reason why i like pirated copies, when i was a kid and didn't knew about piracy i had like 3 modded version of GTA on PS2, it was impossible to mod an original copy so since i didn't had a PC it was the only way to use mods I also had a RE4 version with some cheats included (including making Ashley immortal woohoo)
This kind of brings some memories, when I was a kid my family used to own an arcade distribution business, so they came up with some methods to fix broken boards, one of them included to extract a chip from the game double dragon 2 for nes and insert it in a time based board in case that a similar chip was burned, I still don't know how that worked.
It was actually kind of attractive, Having to only send out a board vs whole cabinet just to have it serviced/change the game, plus most games lifespan were 4-6years before arcades got rid of it entirely
I worked with Artemio on the Policenauts translation for a bit back in 2004-2005. Glad to see his name mentioned, he has contributed so much to retro gaming preservation over the years!
One question I have from watching the video: during your research for this, were you able to find out if Capcom disclosed the suicide board “feature” to buyers when purchasing the boards? Preventing piracy is fine, of course, and I think that was Capcom’s principal concern. However, I think I would be rather unhappy if I were an arcade owner paying for a board repair every few years not knowing that what I was really paying for was essentially a license renewal for *hardware* I had legitimately paid for. Capcom seems to have pulled off something really special here - they created a protection method that was not only very effective at preventing piracy for a relatively long period of time but also created an additional revenue stream. Like many anti piracy schemes legitimate customers get punished in the long run :(
I don't believe it took long for arcade owners to possibly figure out how to replace the battery themselves. You only had to replace the battery every 3 years or so. And once you removed the old battery you had one hour to solder the new battery to the board. Outside of having the new battery be a dud, this was very difficult to mess up. Now the suicide battery on CPS3 hardware was a different story as it was much more difficult to replace the battery on those without killing your board.
Disclosed or not, I really don't like this sort of thing. If not for hackers, there would be no vintage arcades with these games because sooner or later Capcom would just stop offering revival service at any cost. Like my Windows XP box, with its legitimate license, which can't be activated anymore. 😡
I hate DRM on principle for much the same reason. I get why it was done, but it just makes game preservation in the long term so much harder. And while some argue that the companies/people that makes these things 'own' them and can thus do anything they like with them... I disagree that this is a valid perspective, and certainly there's a reason Copyright was originally tied so intimately to the idea of the public domain. Really, the propaganda campaign over many decades that has created this idea of 'intellectual property' by false equivalence to ownership of physical items (ignoring all the secondary implications that 'owning' something intangible like an idea, concept, story or whatever brings) is a highly toxic one, but it doesn't seem that anyone in power actually has any incentive to fight this battle... So the rest of us have to muddle through and deal with legal grey areas (or outright illegal actions) just to keep these games from dying out completely...
@@nickwallette6201 A while back, after XP was supposed to have become unsupported, I found that I couldn't activate it online and tried doing it by telephone. To my surprise, it worked. It seems that the telephone key registration service only cares that the numbers are right and doesn't try to check what version of Windoofus you're trying to activate. It least, it was so a few years ago. It may have changed by now.
There was a CCC video I saw a couple of years ago which may be worth checking out where they talked about hacking this and preserving arcade games in general. Really though, companies like Capcom after so many years should have been the ones to offer an official permanent ‘fix’. I can understand why they did this at the time, but by the mid 2000s that RAM should have been replaced by ROM officially. It still shocks me that Sega may have actually lost source code to several of their games.
Spirit After so many years, I’d expect piracy to be less of a concern since they’ll likely stop selling the cabinets. It’s at that point I think that rather than just replacing the suicide battery/lost decryption via a service, they should instead be replacing it with a ROM based solution.
Well i guess after the lifecycle passes, they are not really bothered to either pirates ripping their games or servicing their old lines of hardware...
Thanks goodness for hackers and computer nerds. I love the fact I can carry a 12,000 square feet arcade in my pocket. I can also carry an entire 1999 electronics boutique inventory in the other pocket.
I’m so glad that I found your channel because you are one the very very few people that have geniune passion for what you do and thats really enjoyable to watch.many people pretend to love programming and other stuff for views but you are not pretending you truly love it.
You're an excellent content creator, it's great following someone who can make a video on any subject well worth watching. I hope you continue on this route and keep growing, you deserve it!
Great video as always! I highly recommend watching GDC's classic postmortem about Ms. Pac-Man. It gives a good insight into how bootleg expansion packs for arcades were made and it's overall interesting story about how Pac-Man bootleg game turned into official game.
Awesome job covering the topic. I recently picked up 3 infikeys. Although the 3 games that I have are still functional when the batteries fail. I'm ready to revive the system :)
I picked up a Marvel Vs Capcom Arcade Cabinet earlier this month that had a CPS2 grey Asia version of the Green board you have in your video! It was giving me a blue screen upon loading the cabinet up. Turns out it was indeed suicided, and after help from the arcade projects forums community, I received a infinikey for 15$ and was able to revive my board! :D It required me to remove the battery and install the chip which took less than 10 minutes. I am in the process of a full recap of the Zennith/K7000A Wells Gardner chassis monitor combo and also recapping the power supply. I will be restoring the wood and repainting it as well. So cool that they stuck with trying to figure this stuff out over two+ decades.
Capcom: Hey, we’re going to sell you a device that will cost you a lot of money and if you don’t keep an eye on it, it will break forever! Arcade Owners: Sounds great!
Regarding CPS1 games, contrary to what is said in the video there is a copy protection. The CPS1 protection is based on two devices, a PAL chip which controls the mapping of the video ROM chips on the graphics memory address space and the type of PPU2 chip (CPS-B-xx) connected to the system at the C board. Originally there were no C board (Daimakaimura) and there were SMD mask roms meaning the boards were not supposed to have the games in them changed. Later on they switched to the B/C board scheme, likely for cost saving with reprogramming the games while keeping the A and B boards. Last thing they did was make battery backed programmable PPUs (CPS-B-21) as a final method of cost saving and protection...
@@ModernVintageGamer Kabuki was used on a few pre-CPS games and on all CPS1 games with Q-SOUND (Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, The Punisher, Saturday Slam Masters, Warriors of Fate, maybe I forgot mentioning any) as protection for the sound CPU. CPS2 may have kabuki chips on their A board as a Z80 but they are run with encryption disabled.
As always, it’s fun to see some of the behind the scenes work that was going on back when some of us old timers were part of the scene back then. I remember when all of this took place with CPS II decrypting. Thanks again for the history lesson!
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Capcom made arcade owners rent games they bought. It guaranteed a steady source of revenue from games that arcade owners already paid a lot of money for. Capcom could advertise new games when owners sent their old ones in for repair. Capcom could even refuse to service existing games and force arcade owners to buy new ones. Looking at console gaming's trends, Capcom was really ahead of its time. This is why I hardly ever play modern games.
I remember years back when visiting websites like cps2shock and geoshock, they were trying to find solutions to decrypt cps2 and certain neogeo ROMs. So many gamers and fans were excited to see this happen! Great video mate! Brought back some nostalgia.
Thought it seemed devoid of that fine voice of yours in my subscribe panel, turns out youtube unsubscribed me from at least four channels in a single sweep some weeks ago including yours. Had a Golden Axe board that set you back at the start screen at no credits after finishing the second stage, or whichever was the one with the turtle you descend from. No error codes or flashes or nothing. Amazing that CPS2 boards can be revived now, great video and work.
I followed the CPS2Shock website closely back in 2001 and there's an extra bit of information I remember. When they were using their method to dump CPS2 games there was a problem where the encrypted CPU would keep switching off before they had managed to dump more than a tiny bit. So they were resetting the board, grabbing a chunk, resetting the board, grabbing the next... Then someone had a look at Rockman the Power Battle which was available on both CPS2 and CPS1. On inspection there were a bunch of spurious instructions in the QSound code IIRC that didn't do anything useful, but when issued on an encrypted CPS2 board suddenly the encrypted CPU would no longer shut down. So whilst it wasn't exactly instrumental in breaking CPS2 encryption, it was another example of how the best encryption systems in the world are often compromised by someone cutting corners. In this case not removing the CPS2 protection code!
I really like this in depth look into the decryption process of these boards. I am truly grateful for these people who took the time to preserve these classic games as the corporations who created them only care about profits and not gaming history. Thank-you for making this video and the people who made the impossible, possible!
I just can't stop watching your videos! The insight you provide to all the technical information and how easy you translate it to simple concepts we all can understand. You do a magnificent work! Thanks!
@@SyeedAli > repair laptop > something else breaks > repair the something else > another thing breaks > repair the another thing > more things break > etc
Your channel just keeps getting better! Whether its old or new, your videos are a great resource and your knowledge gives great insight to this universe.
As soon as I saw the title I knew this was about the evil of suicide batteries. I learned about this bullshit a few years ago and I was shocked. Glad the pirates preserved the games so they aren't lost. "Battery powered encryption keys that are lost once the power stops" is one of the more wicked forms of DRM.
What a great story! This is super duper content. Really hard to get that magic mix of technical knowledge and story telling. 👍❤️ Digging in the crates of retro hardware stories.
Pretty sure one of my local corner shop arcades was running a dodgy copy of SF2. The cabinet had no markings sound wasn't quite right and the game play felt a little bit "off", the timings where just out.
Now i understand why there were cabinets "out of order" in arcades back in those days, i loved a cabinet of, you guessed it, street fighter (i had almost all street fighter versions at home), and 1 day, i walked in the place where the cabinet was, and it was dead, i asked the owner what whas up with the cabinet and he told me he wasn't sure, he showed me, the screen was indeed blue, so now i finally know what was wrong with that cabinet!
@@Boltscrap now thats just straight up murder, however by the context of the video, i percieved "unsuicide" as a means of someone/something that has been revived after the fact that they have intentionally killed themselves/itself
infinikey is such a blessing. I put one inside each of the CPS2 boards I own. Easy as hell to solder in. Just have to be aware of which board revisions you own. Not having to worry about a suicide battery is a huge relief. You definitely need to do a follow up video going over CPS3's suicide battery as well and cover all the darksoft mods.
Charles MacDonald is one of those names that pop up all over the emulation scene, similar to kevtris and nocash. He's done a fair bit of documentation for Sega Master System and Mega Drive / Genesis hardware.
Sun Tzu - 'the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.' This should be in every homebrew dev, bootlegger, and pirate’s house as an inspirational quote
This was great! Always love hearing about the techniques used decades ago. Even today, some of these methods are still very relevant & can learn a lot from them.
I remember a dlc chapter on the last of us when Ellie wanted to play an arcade game, but the machine was wiped with a green screen. So that's why it happened.
Would love it if you would do a video on the history around the cracking of CPS-III and all of the work from Darksoft to preserve and enhance that system.
Wow, this is the first I've ever heard of the CPS Charger, for awhile I've always wondered why Capcom didn't try to compete with the Neo Geo model with a CPS1/2/3 machine...but I know they did wow....alright to contribute to the Patreon, this place is a wealth of knowledge...
for the most part, while most bootlegs had some interesting perks, many players hated them due to the fact that they killed the balance in the game (which was very true for bootlegs of Street Fighter II' Champion Edition which were notorious for its features such as changing characters during a fight, and the often one sided ability to make a hadouken wall with Ryu and Ken's Shouryuken while repeatedly spamming the quick punch Hadouken made it possible to stack hadoukens one after another to create a ''Hadouken Train'') and this led to many companies to send cease and desist orders to those bootleggers, and in Capcom's case, it led to Capcom USA's James Goddard (who would later be known for creating Dee Jay who was the first Street Fighter character made by Capcom USA) to create the official upgrade which is Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting as it's known internationally or SF2' Turbo as it's known in Japan
i love these videos about copy protections and how copy protection is defeated on retro consoles and systems you earned a sub, i hope to see more videos from you about copy protections :)
Why didn't Capcom use the CPS1 suicide battery on SFII CE or SFII Turbo? They seem to have used it on all the CPS1 games from mid-1991 on apart from their two biggest. [Oh never mind, I just realised these games were converted from the original SFII which had no battery to begin with]
Honestly I'd make these kinds of copy protection schemes illegal. Batteries don't live forever, and this is essentially a ticking time bomb that intentionally dies on you.
Vulpovile How would you institute copy protection then? Or do you prefer the developers go bankrupt after their first game because the market is swamped with clones/ripoffs?
Saying that it uses a Feistal cypher is not saying much. That is not a specific cypher, but a general architecture. All (?) modern block cyphers a structured this way.
Yeah, but it does make it clear that it's not ROT13, a simple XOR or some other bogus crypto. In fact, it's implemented as a pair of cascaded 4-round Feistal networks which are both 4-round and use 6->2 S-boxes (different for each round and different between the two networks) and have different key scheduling. The first network takes the key and the low-order 16 bits of the address, then expands the result to 64 bits where it's XORed with the (same) key and used to key the 2nd Feistal network that takes the opcode data read from the ROM and produces the decrypted opcode fed to the CPU.
That battery method (along with the original developers/publishers not bothering to keep code or even any completed versions) is apparently why the Raiden arcade game collections in recent years never seem to include Raiden 2. There just doesn't seem to be a good Rom Dump of the game that isn't flawed in some way. (or maybe there is, but the legitimate publishers clearly don't seem to think so...)
Great episode. I'd really like to see more on the topic of arcade hardware and the copy protection systems they used. It's too bad this was only 14 min as I could have watched an hour of it.
This is exactly how Street Fighter 2 Turbo was invented. It was a hacked version of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition. The hackers and arcade community called it Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Edition. Capcom took it and toned it way down giving us the turbo feature and new movesets. You got the date wrong for the Neo Geo AES. It was released on January 31, 1990.
@@HelloKittyFanMan. Yes once they had served their purpose of stopping bootlegs for a good 10 years. So they did the job...what I'm saying is that if people didn't love games like Alien vs Predator with a passion they might still be uncracked today.
@@stoicvampirepig6063: Yeah, so... for a decade or so, it worked. But then later... opes, it didn't! :-) But yeah... I mean... with the way people are cracking things left and right most of the time, that amount of time is still pretty good in comparison. So you could say it had a good run. :-) But in the end, mistakes were _still_ made. :-P (You know this is kind of tongue-in-cheek, right?) But what I don't like about it is that crazy, draconian self-destructive way of doing it. That's akin to those crazy DVDs that chemically self-destructed after a certain amount of time out in the air. Or those crazy ink tags that render stolen clothes ugly when the thief or his girlfriend, etc. tries to wear them. Crazy shit like that I despise. Yeah, I get what you're saying about still loving the games today. Even the really old ones (Computer Space, Pong, Donkey King, the Pac-Man series, etc.) are loved by the die-hards today, and while I say that if there's a stubborn, hard-headed person who says something odd like, "Oh, those were the days, and those games are so much better than we have today" even though that's really not true (and the same goes for those idiots who say that crap like that there's never any good radio-hit music that comes out in the last decade or 2, and all the "gold" is only the stuff from the '90s and before), I can't blame them for waxing nostalgic just enough to still want to play them. I mean if they don't go overboard with the "stuff made close to when I was is the only good stuff" syndrome crap, then I'm fine with having a little healthy bit of nostalgia for the old games. And I do like some of those old games too.
@@HelloKittyFanMan. Wow that was a big reply...I've just got up and that comment is too long for my sleep addled brain to digest...I'll read it when the coffee kicks in.
Yeah, and I think some bootlegs were even designed to transform arcade cabinets into gambling machines. I remember about that from an journalistic investigation on how some French criminal organizations had such bootleg arcade machines in cafes and French pub (the famous "bistros"). In apparence, the arcade game was an regular JAMMA arcade game. But you had to do a sort of "Konami Code" to access to a hidden menu and voila you were having a gambling machine. Of course it was illegal (because everything around gambling is regulated by the Francaise des Jeux with associated taxes to them).
Keep up these copy protection videos man, really unique content honestly, always thoroughly enjoy these. Maybe make them longer if you can? Looking forward to future ones
@@Xx_m1k3_0X1onG_xX The CPS2 does not have more RAM than the CPS1. Both contain 64 Kilobytes of Work RAM. The big difference is the ability to access far more ROM for storing graphics and sound data. This allows for much more animation, larger sprites, more sprite graphics overall. The Street Fighter Zero port to CPS1 has smaller graphics ROMs than the CPS2 original because the CPS1 didn't support graphics ROMs that large. The port of Street Fighter Zero as well as the CPS1 version of Rockman The Power Battle max out the CPS1's memory capacity I believe. They each have 8 Megabytes of graphics data, which is only 1/4th of what the CPS2 supports, 32 Megabytes. There are other differences but the larger maximum game size was important.
Awesome video a always, you are picking my interest in studying the homebrew and bootleg communities from an academic perspective and that is awesome good sir.
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I’m one of the 4 people who donated the Japanese version of Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha to Razoola back in 2001 (My name is Johnick on the CPS2 Shock donators page). The game was almost 6 years old at the time which is about how long the batteries lasted in the board. If we didn’t donate it to Raz to dump and create the XOR tables back then it probably wouldn’t have been playable in emulators until 2016. Great vid, I have fond memories of the CPS2 days, Raz deliberately released the XOR tables for the oldest games first and staggered the releases so as not to hurt Capcoms sales, as they were still making CPS2 games at that time.
Mr T. Guru So Nebula could do this in 2007 ?, good to know, still at the time nobody knew this would be possible so we felt we had to donate the board before the battery died or potentially lose that version of the game forever.
I remember those days when I waited for Xor table to be released for a new old cps2 game. Now I even personally met the other half of cps2shock, CrashTest.
Greetings, I was one of the monetary donators to cps2shock back in the day. My name is "peace" on the name list page. I also donated Last Blade for the NeoGeo to NeoCharity during those times back then as well. So NaZ could dump it, and I even let him keep it as way of saying thank you for all hes done. Those were the golden years.
Hello, I am also one of the monetary donators to cps2shock back in the day. My name is "Jet" on the name list page. I donated Last Blade for the NeoGeo to NeoCharity during those times back then as well. So NaZ could dump it. Good times
That's a lot of Last Blade!
Oh damn, is this about the Suicide Boards? I hope you follow this up with the decryption of the CPS3. That took forever to get done & we've only had real CPS3 emulation for a relatively short time in comparison.
Hello Mr. VHS
I would love a video on that.
Wait what are you doing here? lol keep up the good work both of you!
The CPS3 was generally accepted as the best way to prevent anti encryption but there were several boards and chips (including the 45djp) the Sprite count caused this to expose certain exploits. The battery can be primed meaning no data is lost, being stored on the board.
CPS3 history please! Cheers!
I'm awestruck by how huge that CPS2 arcade board with the casing is! I had no idea until you held it up in front of you.
It's like a giant cart! And people say NeoGeo carts were huge.
For real, they were huge. Even the old donkey Kong boards were big af
Arcade boards are huge since after all arcade cabinets are the size of closets. So unlike with console or even pc motherboards there is no reason not to spread them out.
@@BLKBRDSR71Well unlike Neo Geo these are the console and the ROM cartridge all-in-one
I find these copy protection videos you make incredibly fascinating! I think I've watched them all! LOL
thank you so much
Same. If only there were more
same here
Copy protection is awesome! Copy protection techniques only arise because of people not abiding by the rules. In a perfect word (i.e. some mathematical worlds) copy protection is a non-factor.
@@CARROTMOLD you work for them dont you
My local pizza joint had a version of Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Edition bootleg running back in the 90s. At the time I had no idea it was a bootleg, I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but no one ever believed me when I would tell them about a version of SF2 that you could change characters with the start button, or do specials in mid air. It wasn't until recently I found out a slew of these bootlegs were released everywhere, and real.
I legit played street fighter rainbow edition like 2 years ago it's still there at the laundromat by my house but they stopped plugging it In
Chun li spinning bird kick went full screen and took half your health even if blocked
@@JustJoey727 Probably started glitching or not taking credits. Or they got annoyed by the attract mode and didn't know how to enter settings.
@@Krystalmyth yah the machine is kinda busted they replaced the CRT monitor on the machine with a computer monitor
the only reason why i like pirated copies, when i was a kid and didn't knew about piracy i had like 3 modded version of GTA on PS2, it was impossible to mod an original copy so since i didn't had a PC it was the only way to use mods
I also had a RE4 version with some cheats included (including making Ashley immortal woohoo)
Enjoyed that. I never knew anything about those acarde boards or how they worked. Thanks mate.
Karl Rock yes
Nahi chahiye ji
This kind of brings some memories, when I was a kid my family used to own an arcade distribution business, so they came up with some methods to fix broken boards, one of them included to extract a chip from the game double dragon 2 for nes and insert it in a time based board in case that a similar chip was burned, I still don't know how that worked.
Denuvo : I'm the most advanced DRM in the world
This thing : that's cute
Denuvo: So great it doesn’t even work. Well, at least it harms the PCs of honest customers.
@@soundspark Introducing exploitable backdoor on to my PC = Harmful
@@Thomas-cu5hp You must be thinking of StarForce or something, Denuvo is shit, yes, but as far as I'm aware it doesn't include any backdoors.
DENUVO: I'm uncrackable.
CPY: Hold my beer!
@@soundspark Do you know what is it CPY?
Battery: did you do it?
Capcom: yes.
Battery: what did it cost?
Capcom: **Teal Screen**
Master Matthew Capcom is thanks confirmed.
Kudos for crediting all the people that worked on decryption the ROM set. Saying thanks costs nothing but some people are too "proud" to even do that.
Copy protection on game/computer systems, I love learning about this stuff!
Great video!
thank you Maddi !
its very cool stuff
Ms Mad Lemon
Still running the arcade in 2019, why you need this now?
People still pay???
Screwed bootleggers.
Screwed legitimate owners too.
It was actually kind of attractive, Having to only send out a board vs whole cabinet just to have it serviced/change the game, plus most games lifespan were 4-6years before arcades got rid of it entirely
That is what DRM usually does. Now, it just screws legitimate owners - looking at you Denuvo.
@@lLxJLxJl Except being charged to fix something intentionally broken by the manufacturer.
Jeff It’s called planned obsolesce
*Gateway 3ds flashbacks*
I worked with Artemio on the Policenauts translation for a bit back in 2004-2005. Glad to see his name mentioned, he has contributed so much to retro gaming preservation over the years!
One question I have from watching the video: during your research for this, were you able to find out if Capcom disclosed the suicide board “feature” to buyers when purchasing the boards?
Preventing piracy is fine, of course, and I think that was Capcom’s principal concern. However, I think I would be rather unhappy if I were an arcade owner paying for a board repair every few years not knowing that what I was really paying for was essentially a license renewal for *hardware* I had legitimately paid for.
Capcom seems to have pulled off something really special here - they created a protection method that was not only very effective at preventing piracy for a relatively long period of time but also created an additional revenue stream. Like many anti piracy schemes legitimate customers get punished in the long run :(
I don't believe it took long for arcade owners to possibly figure out how to replace the battery themselves. You only had to replace the battery every 3 years or so. And once you removed the old battery you had one hour to solder the new battery to the board. Outside of having the new battery be a dud, this was very difficult to mess up. Now the suicide battery on CPS3 hardware was a different story as it was much more difficult to replace the battery on those without killing your board.
Disclosed or not, I really don't like this sort of thing. If not for hackers, there would be no vintage arcades with these games because sooner or later Capcom would just stop offering revival service at any cost.
Like my Windows XP box, with its legitimate license, which can't be activated anymore. 😡
@@nickwallette6201 but why play old games when you can buy new ones? -lawyers
I hate DRM on principle for much the same reason.
I get why it was done, but it just makes game preservation in the long term so much harder.
And while some argue that the companies/people that makes these things 'own' them and can thus do anything they like with them...
I disagree that this is a valid perspective, and certainly there's a reason Copyright was originally tied so intimately to the idea of the public domain.
Really, the propaganda campaign over many decades that has created this idea of 'intellectual property' by false equivalence to ownership of physical items (ignoring all the secondary implications that 'owning' something intangible like an idea, concept, story or whatever brings) is a highly toxic one, but it doesn't seem that anyone in power actually has any incentive to fight this battle...
So the rest of us have to muddle through and deal with legal grey areas (or outright illegal actions) just to keep these games from dying out completely...
@@nickwallette6201 A while back, after XP was supposed to have become unsupported, I found that I couldn't activate it online and tried doing it by telephone. To my surprise, it worked. It seems that the telephone key registration service only cares that the numbers are right and doesn't try to check what version of Windoofus you're trying to activate. It least, it was so a few years ago. It may have changed by now.
So did you revive your marvel vs capcom ?
I got an Infikey and will be doing so yep
yes make a video of it
@@ModernVintageGamer Yeah, please, make a video about the revival of your cartridge
@@ModernVintageGamer You should make a video on how you did it.
Yoo Late for nothing is still my favorite iwabo album 💖
Loving the copy protection videos, keep them up dude :)
RefractionPCSX2
You still run some Arcade hall??? copy protection??
@@lucasrem I'm not sure what you're talking about, I think you have me confused with somebody else.
Excellent. I was hoping we would get some arcade based copy protection history vids. Great vids!
There was a CCC video I saw a couple of years ago which may be worth checking out where they talked about hacking this and preserving arcade games in general.
Really though, companies like Capcom after so many years should have been the ones to offer an official permanent ‘fix’.
I can understand why they did this at the time, but by the mid 2000s that RAM should have been replaced by ROM officially.
It still shocks me that Sega may have actually lost source code to several of their games.
ROM is easy to read. Battery-backed RAM requires some rather extreme techniques to preserve.
Spirit After so many years, I’d expect piracy to be less of a concern since they’ll likely stop selling the cabinets.
It’s at that point I think that rather than just replacing the suicide battery/lost decryption via a service, they should instead be replacing it with a ROM based solution.
@@tech34756 It's not like the service still exists...
Well i guess after the lifecycle passes, they are not really bothered to either pirates ripping their games or servicing their old lines of hardware...
Thanks goodness for hackers and computer nerds. I love the fact I can carry a 12,000 square feet arcade in my pocket. I can also carry an entire 1999 electronics boutique inventory in the other pocket.
Oh yes! That's why emulation is very important!
It's all about saving great games from disappearing.
Why not the same pocket
@@Anonymous-zu7dh hes got small pockets 🤔
Jake Steed
How to make more money, just copy them!
Square feed???
Man I really love learning about this shit.
Another Monday, another great MVG vid.
"monday" vintage gamer
Jojo
I’m so glad that I found your channel because you are one the very very few people that have geniune passion for what you do and thats really enjoyable to watch.many people pretend to love programming and other stuff for views but you are not pretending you truly love it.
seems to me that Capcom was really good at what it did. The company was ahead of the curve. The devs were 'on fire".
You're an excellent content creator, it's great following someone who can make a video on any subject well worth watching. I hope you continue on this route and keep growing, you deserve it!
Great video as always! I highly recommend watching GDC's classic postmortem about Ms. Pac-Man. It gives a good insight into how bootleg expansion packs for arcades were made and it's overall interesting story about how Pac-Man bootleg game turned into official game.
Oh these are somehow the most interesting episodes, things i vaguely remember but now am reminded of again. Thank you for them man.
Awesome job covering the topic. I recently picked up 3 infikeys. Although the 3 games that I have are still functional when the batteries fail. I'm ready to revive the system :)
I picked up a Marvel Vs Capcom Arcade Cabinet earlier this month that had a CPS2 grey Asia version of the Green board you have in your video! It was giving me a blue screen upon loading the cabinet up. Turns out it was indeed suicided, and after help from the arcade projects forums community, I received a infinikey for 15$ and was able to revive my board! :D It required me to remove the battery and install the chip which took less than 10 minutes. I am in the process of a full recap of the Zennith/K7000A Wells Gardner chassis monitor combo and also recapping the power supply. I will be restoring the wood and repainting it as well. So cool that they stuck with trying to figure this stuff out over two+ decades.
Capcom: Hey, we’re going to sell you a device that will cost you a lot of money and if you don’t keep an eye on it, it will break forever!
Arcade Owners: Sounds great!
Yeah except they would fix it if you sent it in.
Regarding CPS1 games, contrary to what is said in the video there is a copy protection. The CPS1 protection is based on two devices, a PAL chip which controls the mapping of the video ROM chips on the graphics memory address space and the type of PPU2 chip (CPS-B-xx) connected to the system at the C board. Originally there were no C board (Daimakaimura) and there were SMD mask roms meaning the boards were not supposed to have the games in them changed. Later on they switched to the B/C board scheme, likely for cost saving with reprogramming the games while keeping the A and B boards. Last thing they did was make battery backed programmable PPUs (CPS-B-21) as a final method of cost saving and protection...
thanks for clarifying. there was also Kabuki but it was unclear to me if that was a part of CPS1 or pre-CPS1 stuff
@@ModernVintageGamer Kabuki was used on a few pre-CPS games and on all CPS1 games with Q-SOUND (Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, The Punisher, Saturday Slam Masters, Warriors of Fate, maybe I forgot mentioning any) as protection for the sound CPU. CPS2 may have kabuki chips on their A board as a Z80 but they are run with encryption disabled.
That was an impressive video documentary! Thank you very much, that was really interesting and informative. You did a really good job!
As always, it’s fun to see some of the behind the scenes work that was going on back when some of us old timers were part of the scene back then. I remember when all of this took place with CPS II decrypting. Thanks again for the history lesson!
I think bootlegs aren't as bad as your product LITERALLY BRICKING
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Capcom made arcade owners rent games they bought. It guaranteed a steady source of revenue from games that arcade owners already paid a lot of money for. Capcom could advertise new games when owners sent their old ones in for repair. Capcom could even refuse to service existing games and force arcade owners to buy new ones.
Looking at console gaming's trends, Capcom was really ahead of its time. This is why I hardly ever play modern games.
Arcade manufacturers played a hand in the destruction of their own industry imo.
- who the hell are you talking to?
I remember years back when visiting websites like cps2shock and geoshock, they were trying to find solutions to decrypt cps2 and certain neogeo ROMs. So many gamers and fans were excited to see this happen!
Great video mate! Brought back some nostalgia.
It's incredible how good the music in CPS2 games are. Good times.
Thought it seemed devoid of that fine voice of yours in my subscribe panel, turns out youtube unsubscribed me from at least four channels in a single sweep some weeks ago including yours. Had a Golden Axe board that set you back at the start screen at no credits after finishing the second stage, or whichever was the one with the turtle you descend from. No error codes or flashes or nothing. Amazing that CPS2 boards can be revived now, great video and work.
I don't think we can say bootlegs are "bad". The piracy scene is as fun to explore as the genuine games themselves.
It's not the piracy, more just shoddy build quaility.
I followed the CPS2Shock website closely back in 2001 and there's an extra bit of information I remember. When they were using their method to dump CPS2 games there was a problem where the encrypted CPU would keep switching off before they had managed to dump more than a tiny bit. So they were resetting the board, grabbing a chunk, resetting the board, grabbing the next... Then someone had a look at Rockman the Power Battle which was available on both CPS2 and CPS1. On inspection there were a bunch of spurious instructions in the QSound code IIRC that didn't do anything useful, but when issued on an encrypted CPS2 board suddenly the encrypted CPU would no longer shut down. So whilst it wasn't exactly instrumental in breaking CPS2 encryption, it was another example of how the best encryption systems in the world are often compromised by someone cutting corners. In this case not removing the CPS2 protection code!
A nice insight there, thanks for that. I love my CPS2 games.
you still do that Arcade shit in 2019????
I really like this in depth look into the decryption process of these boards. I am truly grateful for these people who took the time to preserve these classic games as the corporations who created them only care about profits and not gaming history. Thank-you for making this video and the people who made the impossible, possible!
its not a technically suicide battery, its a kamikaze battery...
it doesnt chose to die, its forced to die by its operating guidelines.
I just can't stop watching your videos! The insight you provide to all the technical information and how easy you translate it to simple concepts we all can understand. You do a magnificent work! Thanks!
HAHAHA the "it might damage the cabinet" argument.
Apple took a page out of that for the right to repair effort..
By cabinet he means the rest of the equipment in there. remember there is more hardware to these then that big green cartridge
I got that, but it's like Apple's argument that repairing might damage the laptop, or their exploding-microwave argument.
@@SyeedAli
> repair laptop
> something else breaks
> repair the something else
> another thing breaks
> repair the another thing
> more things break
> etc
@@EvertGuzman Not really. just a video cable and a power supply.
@@Runslik3Wind Not in jamma cabnets
Your channel just keeps getting better!
Whether its old or new, your videos are a great resource and your knowledge gives great insight to this universe.
CP3 next please?, I still remember when the code was finally cracked for emulators around 2007, there was a lot of joy in the scene.
damn capcom... ironic they're now pirating themselves with the arcade stick... awesome content as usual keep them coming ;)
I bet they don't even bother using their own ROMs for that thing.
@@SlyBeast yep. Especially since the arcade stick will use Final Burn Alpha.
th3 Cub3 whatsthe arcade stick called ?
Excellent content! I just love these series of hacking game systems. Five stars!
but youtube doesn't use a star rating system anymore
@@coalstocking it's a shame, they should have at least "like it", "like it very much" and "loving it" ;)
As soon as I saw the title I knew this was about the evil of suicide batteries. I learned about this bullshit a few years ago and I was shocked. Glad the pirates preserved the games so they aren't lost.
"Battery powered encryption keys that are lost once the power stops" is one of the more wicked forms of DRM.
Wreck it Ralph's Turbo: The Story You Never Knew
As someone that started with new fighting games and going back to retro, these videos are amazing. Thank you
Literally every video is interesting and informative
What a great story! This is super duper content. Really hard to get that magic mix of technical knowledge and story telling. 👍❤️ Digging in the crates of retro hardware stories.
Pretty sure one of my local corner shop arcades was running a dodgy copy of SF2.
The cabinet had no markings sound wasn't quite right and the game play felt a little bit "off", the timings where just out.
Now i understand why there were cabinets "out of order" in arcades back in those days, i loved a cabinet of, you guessed it, street fighter (i had almost all street fighter versions at home), and 1 day, i walked in the place where the cabinet was, and it was dead, i asked the owner what whas up with the cabinet and he told me he wasn't sure, he showed me, the screen was indeed blue, so now i finally know what was wrong with that cabinet!
"unsuicide" -MVG 2019
*me inside my stupid brain: hmph how i wish i could unsuicide anyone*
also "suicided"
Maybe unsuicide means that you traveled back in time to assassinate them, thus preventing suicide.
@@Boltscrap now thats just straight up murder, however by the context of the video, i percieved "unsuicide" as a means of someone/something that has been revived after the fact that they have intentionally killed themselves/itself
Why would you unsuicide someone?
@@zakazany1945 ?
infinikey is such a blessing. I put one inside each of the CPS2 boards I own. Easy as hell to solder in. Just have to be aware of which board revisions you own. Not having to worry about a suicide battery is a huge relief. You definitely need to do a follow up video going over CPS3's suicide battery as well and cover all the darksoft mods.
Mvg this is a deep cut 👀😁 that capture looks nice gotta look at playing these now
This is a great feature video, thank you. I remember following the CPS2 shock website and patiently waiting!
Great and detailed video asusual. Before this i have never knows about CPS2 protection
I love these videos so much please never stop making videos like these even if it's not exactly copy protection.
Charles McDonald? Isn't he the programmer of Genesis Plus GX?
Yes
Charles MacDonald is one of those names that pop up all over the emulation scene, similar to kevtris and nocash. He's done a fair bit of documentation for Sega Master System and Mega Drive / Genesis hardware.
@@fanzyflani3576 Now that is whatcha call "an emulation celebrity" (yeah, that term is a bit cringey though)
@@abzhuofficial Not at all
An absolute God. Documented the Z80 exhaustively
Sun Tzu - 'the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.'
This should be in every homebrew dev, bootlegger, and pirate’s house as an inspirational quote
Ms Pacman has of the best arcade bootlegging stories, check the postmortem video they made.
This was great! Always love hearing about the techniques used decades ago. Even today, some of these methods are still very relevant & can learn a lot from them.
Man, I turned off the in game ads, why is he still wearing the Pro Tour shirt?
Great Story and Great Video !
Keep this going...
I remember a dlc chapter on the last of us when Ellie wanted to play an arcade game, but the machine was wiped with a green screen. So that's why it happened.
Love how thorough you are dude. Really really outstanding stuff.
I'm blessed. Would give this vid 500 thumbs up if I could. Keep making the good stuff
Just make 500 Google accounts and you're good to go... 😊
Would love it if you would do a video on the history around the cracking of CPS-III and all of the work from Darksoft to preserve and enhance that system.
Doesn't taking the road away in road rash, make it a safer game?
Considering how terrible I am at racing games, I might just actually play that.
Great video as usual! As an arcade nerd this was great fun to watch. Hopefully we get more of these in future!
And now with all those dumped ROMs, I can play MvC on my PSP
Yeah, add a ball top and some convex Sanwa competition buttons and it'll feel as authentic as the real machine.
Wow, this is the first I've ever heard of the CPS Charger, for awhile I've always wondered why Capcom didn't try to compete with the Neo Geo model with a CPS1/2/3 machine...but I know they did wow....alright to contribute to the Patreon, this place is a wealth of knowledge...
Another great vid bro!
This is honestly one of the best channels on TH-cam
You show footage of Damned randomly exploding gang members on a subway train yet conclude bootlegs are bad. 🤔
for the most part, while most bootlegs had some interesting perks, many players hated them due to the fact that they killed the balance in the game (which was very true for bootlegs of Street Fighter II' Champion Edition which were notorious for its features such as changing characters during a fight, and the often one sided ability to make a hadouken wall with Ryu and Ken's Shouryuken while repeatedly spamming the quick punch Hadouken made it possible to stack hadoukens one after another to create a ''Hadouken Train'') and this led to many companies to send cease and desist orders to those bootleggers, and in Capcom's case, it led to Capcom USA's James Goddard (who would later be known for creating Dee Jay who was the first Street Fighter character made by Capcom USA) to create the official upgrade which is Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting as it's known internationally or SF2' Turbo as it's known in Japan
i love these videos about copy protections and how copy protection is defeated on retro consoles and systems
you earned a sub, i hope to see more videos from you about copy protections :)
Why didn't Capcom use the CPS1 suicide battery on SFII CE or SFII Turbo?
They seem to have used it on all the CPS1 games from mid-1991 on apart from their two biggest.
[Oh never mind, I just realised these games were converted from the original SFII which had no battery to begin with]
I sit through some really weird ads for you MVG 🤣. Showing my support for the channel!
Honestly I'd make these kinds of copy protection schemes illegal. Batteries don't live forever, and this is essentially a ticking time bomb that intentionally dies on you.
Vulpovile How would you institute copy protection then? Or do you prefer the developers go bankrupt after their first game because the market is swamped with clones/ripoffs?
You can play as Damned on that Final Fight bootleg....dear lord that is the coolest thing I've ever seen. I love your channel so much.
Saying that it uses a Feistal cypher is not saying much. That is not a specific cypher, but a general architecture. All (?) modern block cyphers a structured this way.
Yeah, but it does make it clear that it's not ROT13, a simple XOR or some other bogus crypto. In fact, it's implemented as a pair of cascaded 4-round Feistal networks which are both 4-round and use 6->2 S-boxes (different for each round and different between the two networks) and have different key scheduling. The first network takes the key and the low-order 16 bits of the address, then expands the result to 64 bits where it's XORed with the (same) key and used to key the 2nd Feistal network that takes the opcode data read from the ROM and produces the decrypted opcode fed to the CPU.
Amazing, it is hard to think that the Next videos are Better than this!
That battery method (along with the original developers/publishers not bothering to keep code or even any completed versions) is apparently why the Raiden arcade game collections in recent years never seem to include Raiden 2.
There just doesn't seem to be a good Rom Dump of the game that isn't flawed in some way.
(or maybe there is, but the legitimate publishers clearly don't seem to think so...)
Great episode. I'd really like to see more on the topic of arcade hardware and the copy protection systems they used. It's too bad this was only 14 min as I could have watched an hour of it.
Capcom: You must defeat my maths to stand a chance!
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F 10
Content like this makes me love this channel even more! Keep it up MVG!!!
Interesting how Capcom gave away the keys to decryption themselves, with the CPS Charger!
Excellent upload. I still remember how exciting it was when SFZ/SFA got released for final burn back then.
Capcom were madmen
This is exactly how Street Fighter 2 Turbo was invented. It was a hacked version of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition. The hackers and arcade community called it Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Edition. Capcom took it and toned it way down giving us the turbo feature and new movesets.
You got the date wrong for the Neo Geo AES. It was released on January 31, 1990.
So if I understand correctly from this video about Capcom's case: Mistakes were _still_ made!
Not really...they did the job, if Capcom make any mistakes it was making their games too good not to crack.
@@stoicvampirepig6063: No, he said that even these got cracked eventually.
@@HelloKittyFanMan.
Yes once they had served their purpose of stopping bootlegs for a good 10 years.
So they did the job...what I'm saying is that if people didn't love games like Alien vs Predator with a passion they might still be uncracked today.
@@stoicvampirepig6063: Yeah, so... for a decade or so, it worked. But then later... opes, it didn't! :-) But yeah... I mean... with the way people are cracking things left and right most of the time, that amount of time is still pretty good in comparison. So you could say it had a good run. :-) But in the end, mistakes were _still_ made. :-P (You know this is kind of tongue-in-cheek, right?)
But what I don't like about it is that crazy, draconian self-destructive way of doing it. That's akin to those crazy DVDs that chemically self-destructed after a certain amount of time out in the air. Or those crazy ink tags that render stolen clothes ugly when the thief or his girlfriend, etc. tries to wear them. Crazy shit like that I despise.
Yeah, I get what you're saying about still loving the games today. Even the really old ones (Computer Space, Pong, Donkey King, the Pac-Man series, etc.) are loved by the die-hards today, and while I say that if there's a stubborn, hard-headed person who says something odd like, "Oh, those were the days, and those games are so much better than we have today" even though that's really not true (and the same goes for those idiots who say that crap like that there's never any good radio-hit music that comes out in the last decade or 2, and all the "gold" is only the stuff from the '90s and before), I can't blame them for waxing nostalgic just enough to still want to play them. I mean if they don't go overboard with the "stuff made close to when I was is the only good stuff" syndrome crap, then I'm fine with having a little healthy bit of nostalgia for the old games. And I do like some of those old games too.
@@HelloKittyFanMan.
Wow that was a big reply...I've just got up and that comment is too long for my sleep addled brain to digest...I'll read it when the coffee kicks in.
Oh man, the golden age of CPS.
I was always curious how they dumped Cps software and how to hack it.
this info is so rare!
Hongkong and Taiwan was heaven for this kind of bootleg board
Yeah, and I think some bootlegs were even designed to transform arcade cabinets into gambling machines. I remember about that from an journalistic investigation on how some French criminal organizations had such bootleg arcade machines in cafes and French pub (the famous "bistros"). In apparence, the arcade game was an regular JAMMA arcade game. But you had to do a sort of "Konami Code" to access to a hidden menu and voila you were having a gambling machine. Of course it was illegal (because everything around gambling is regulated by the Francaise des Jeux with associated taxes to them).
So we can expect a revival video of that CPS2 board sometime soon! :D Good video as always!
9:23 Spelling correctly about CPS *Changer* - Not "Charger".
Keep up these copy protection videos man, really unique content honestly, always thoroughly enjoy these. Maybe make them longer if you can? Looking forward to future ones
If the cps2 is supossed to be little more than a security and audio enchanced cps1 , how do so many of it's games look so much better
Is it just because games based on cps2 happened to requiere more ram ?
I guess the devs were able to optimize their games more. The ram upgrade would make a solid difference though
I mean the tekken arcade games use ps1 hardware with twice the v ram (4mb compared to 2mb) so maybe that's it
@@Xx_m1k3_0X1onG_xX The CPS2 does not have more RAM than the CPS1. Both contain 64 Kilobytes of Work RAM. The big difference is the ability to access far more ROM for storing graphics and sound data. This allows for much more animation, larger sprites, more sprite graphics overall. The Street Fighter Zero port to CPS1 has smaller graphics ROMs than the CPS2 original because the CPS1 didn't support graphics ROMs that large. The port of Street Fighter Zero as well as the CPS1 version of Rockman The Power Battle max out the CPS1's memory capacity I believe. They each have 8 Megabytes of graphics data, which is only 1/4th of what the CPS2 supports, 32 Megabytes.
There are other differences but the larger maximum game size was important.
Awesome video a always, you are picking my interest in studying the homebrew and bootleg communities from an academic perspective and that is awesome good sir.