Friday, August 19, 2011

1 BIOS is enough

Following my crusade against CPS3 protection, I created an unencrypted BIOS, an unencripted ROMSET and an unencripted MAME's cps3.c. I put everything together (it's easier to say that to do) and finally I run it.
Good news is that it works great and ONLY one bios, SFIII NewGen works with all 6 games.

Actually if you check the code when the game is running it doesn't go back to the BIOS (at least I didn't see it), what makes me believe that once it starts running the game BIOS is not needed anymore.

If we press the service button AND select rewrite the game or the graphics, then we'll jump back to the BIOS.
Another interesting thing is that the Service menu is located in the game code, not in the BIOS.

I also managed to remove all protections in this decrypted BIOS and now it takes any code. I still need to remove the Capcom format CD check.

Unfortunately  for some strange reason (probably related to the encyrption) this BIOS can only update the char roms, it doesn't update the code.
Another problem, probably originated by the same reason as above, it gives a failure in the SIMM memory check of the BIOS, but only in the SIMMS that hold the code, the rest are OK...needs further checking.

More news soon.

4 comments:

  1. Man, your work is so amazing. I can't believe you're actually so close to bypass CPS3 security on the original hardware. It's a dream that comes true.

    I'm totally hopeless in electronics so I can't really help but I'm 100% with you on this project.
    And I'm sure my dead 3.3 cartridge feel the same :D

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  2. Wow that's a huge step forward! Very well done. I'm glad you explain it all as well, I find it very interesting :)

    Looking forward to the next post!

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  4. Hope you can get it to run on real hardware then. I am told that the MAME team already tried repacing the custom SH2 with a standard one to run unencrypted code and it did not work. :/

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