Saturday 14 June 2014

Capcom CPS3 and Suicide Battery's

The Capcom CPS3 system is something I have been interested in for quite some time, but have avoided due to the suicide battery issues, as well as them not being the most reliable pieces of hardware. When I recently got the opportunity to buy one with a desuicided cart I couldn't say no. I'm now awaiting delivery of my CPS3 system and will put up an update once it arrives.

On the subject of the suicide battery's, for those who don't know this was a copy protection method used by Capcom among other arcade manufacturers which meant when the circuit lost the charge of the battery, it would lose data stored in RAM. That data happened to be decryption keys for the data on the board. Without these decryption keys, the board would boot to a solid colour screen and be in a 'Suicided state'.

There has been some great work going on from the arcade community to create decrypted versions of the game code. The CPS2 binaries were created a few years back, and have seen plenty of CPS2 boards brought back to life. The CPS3 work was only completed recently, but this is more great news for the community, and will no doubt bring back a resurgence of the CPS3 system, particularly from those wary of it such as myself.

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