Ketsui PCB reissue petition

rtw · Post by **rtw** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 6:43 am

elvis wrote:
Twiddle wrote:No can do. Arika/Cave told mamedev not to emulate it and other Cave PGM games.
Cave "told them so"?

MAMEDEV has a policy of removing games if the copyright holder desires.

elvis wrote: What the hell?
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=809
20MHz Motorola 68K chip. (To put it in perspective, CPS2 is 16MHz M68K).
Is this thread full of people smoking drugs?

Granted the CPU is simple but IGS have developed custom ASIC's to
handle greaphics and offload the main processor. In addition there
is an extra processor which most likely contains an encrypted
ARM7 which handles protection and bullet patterns.

Here is some light reading:

http://www.mamedev.org/source/src/mame/ ... pgm.c.html

AFAIK no GFX chips are dumped for any Cave PGM games . In fact no
boards have been sent to Guru.

But if MAME got a proper dump including the ARM7 it would have no
trouble emulating it at all since it would have random access to the
tilemaps. Lack of memory is what breaks the PS2 port.

rtw

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:19 am

so do we get off our asses now and actually try and be proactive about getting a board that's dumpable??

who's taking the money, where do we get one from and who's down?

elvis · Post by **elvis** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:22 am

DoDonPachi II: Bee Storm is on identical hardware to Ketsui.

http://www.mameworld.net/maws/romset/ddp2
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=809

Emulation is certainly not 100%, but game speed is more than acceptable on mid-range hardware.

EOJ · Post by **EOJ** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:26 am

If 100 people chipped in, that would only be $7-8 per person to get a Ketsui board and ship it to be dumped. I'd certainly donate that. Could we get 99 other members here to chip in?

rtw · Post by **rtw** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:31 am

elvis wrote:DoDonPachi II: Bee Storm is on identical hardware to Ketsui.

http://www.mameworld.net/maws/romset/ddp2
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=809

Emulation is certainly not 100%, but game speed is more than acceptable on mid-range hardware.

And the reason for the not 100% is that the protection chip is not emulated.

If someone wants to organize a Ketsui buy I would be happy to donate.
I recommend us buying the PCB and shipping it to Guru instead of
donating funds to him. I would donate 50USD at least.

rtw

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:35 am

ok i'm down.

at least let's try and do something..

shall I take responsibility of paypal donations?

I took a lot of people's cash for the ikaruga tees, i guess people could see me as trustworthy...
if it goes nowhere after a few months i refund everyone.

if noone gets off their ass to at least try and see if this can happen, it's simply not going to happen at all....

well?

P_HAT · Post by **P_HAT** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:36 am

TWE wrote:If 100 people chipped in, that would only be $7-8 per person to get a Ketsui board and ship it to be dumped. I'd certainly donate that. Could we get 99 other members here to chip in?

Maybe we shoul start specia thread?
Because i don't know how to donate to mame team

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:40 am

if someone's elected to take paypal payments we can start a thread immediately, we just need someone to take the money and then source a board.

like I say i'll take charge of the collection, any objections?

zakk · Post by **zakk** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:41 am

If I knew my board would return in useable condition he could dump mine for all I care. It's not exactly hard to reattach the surface mounted roms, I've done it on other boards.

The big question is what sort of hackery is required to get at the internal ARM data. Also if they haven't put forth the effort into breaking the protection on other PGM games, I'm not going to risk my board only to have them sit on the roms for years until someone gets PGM emulation working 100%

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:43 am

I think its safer to get a board we can sacrifice to the emulation gods, noone needs to lose a beloved STG in some resoldering surgery complications..

stanski · Post by **stanski** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:43 am

pixelcorps wrote:if someone's elected to take paypal payments we can start a thread immediately, we just need someone to take the money and then source a board.

like I say i'll take charge of the collection, any objections?

Can we get ebay feedback or something else to substantiate you?

Paypal is a bitch because of fees, but if there is no other way, then bleh.

Maybe we could pay someone to rent their PCB to us for like a couple months? I think this would be better than buying one straight up.

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:47 am

well, i'd say 50% of the forum bought ikaruga tees from me.

my ebay ID is :

studiomoo

it's 99% due to some retaliatory feedback.

rtw · Post by **rtw** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:55 am

pixelcorps wrote:like I say i'll take charge of the collection, any objections?

Excellent idea, maybe start a special thread ? Sticky ? List of donators ?

It's important that we buy the board and ship it to Guru. Guru
does not accept donations against a specific PCB.

rtw

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:57 am

ok, fine, let's see what we can do about this.

I'll start the thread, and i'll update with the total on a daily basis.

ikimaaaaaaasu!!!!!

rtw · Post by **rtw** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:58 am

stanski wrote:Maybe we could pay someone to rent their PCB to us for like a couple months? I think this would be better than buying one straight up.

The board may die, and it may take a while. Best we buy one ourselves.

rtw

Battlesmurf · Post by **Battlesmurf** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 8:01 am

lol..well, I'm not sure if I like the idea or not. I do want people to enjoy the game- at the same time i think it's a bad idea- that forcing your way to have a game dumped/emulated isn't going to make a dev want to port it any more than they already (do/don't?: ). Maybe that's just me.....

with that being said- find someone that has a cab and a game or supergun-whatever- and play it there- but patient- and give it a bit for it to come out. There's no need to rush an imperfect/shitty emu'- it won't do that game justice..... but i guess everything has to start somewhere.

zakk · Post by **zakk** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 8:07 am

Battlesmurf wrote:lol..well, I'm not sure if I like the idea or not. I do want people to enjoy the game- at the same time i think it's a bad idea- that forcing your way to have a game dumped/emulated isn't going to make a dev want to port it any more than they already (do/don't?: ). Maybe that's just me.....

Yes, but having a dump certainly gets you closer than not having a dump.

Let's keep taking money until we can give them a DOJ:Black Label too. Maybe someone can get good data off of it without suiciding it. As time goes on that's only going to get more difficult.

ninja edit:

I think it's important to set expectations here. People need to be told very explicitly that giving guru a board does not mean it gets dumped in a timely fashion, and even when it does it doesn't mean it ends up playable in mame in any sort of timeframe they may care about.

They need to understand this before giving anyone money. The last thing you need is people complaining 2 years from now when it's still not playable in mame for some reason.

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 8:14 am

ok, the thread's up, I started the collection with $40 of my own

caveat and full explanation's there, let's see what happens.

rtw · Post by **rtw** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 8:25 am

zakk wrote:Let's keep taking money until we can give them a DOJ:Black Label too. Maybe someone can get good data off of it without suiciding it. As time goes on that's only going to get more difficult.

I don't believe there is need for a Black Label, I have already dumped the
main program ROM. I believe the chips on the PCB are the same as a regular Dai-Ou-Jou except the change in program code i.e. the EPROM.

The difference is that the Dai-Ou-Jou BL checks for a certain pattern
in NVRAM and fails if it is not there.

So a regular Dai-Ou-Jou should suffice.

rtw

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 8:27 am

ok, well, lets see if this 1st attempt is a success and continue from there!

zakk · Post by **zakk** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 8:30 am

rtw wrote:
zakk wrote:Let's keep taking money until we can give them a DOJ:Black Label too. Maybe someone can get good data off of it without suiciding it. As time goes on that's only going to get more difficult.
I don't believe there is need for a Black Label, I have already dumped the
main program ROM. I believe the chips on the PCB are the same as a regular Dai-Ou-Jou except the change in program code i.e. the EPROM.

The difference is that the Dai-Ou-Jou BL checks for a certain pattern
in NVRAM and fails if it is not there.

So a regular Dai-Ou-Jou should suffice.

rtw

Ah ha. Although it might be nice to know the pattern it's looking for, but you can eventually figure it out via the program dump.

You could theoretically patch the program rom to ignore the test (or set the pattern to something else), unless there's additional protections against changing the program rom?

rtw · Post by **rtw** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 8:35 am

zakk wrote:Ah ha. Although it might be nice to know the pattern it's looking for, but you can eventually figure it out via the program dump.

You could theoretically patch the program rom to ignore the test (or set the pattern to something else), unless there's additional protections against changing the program rom?

I suspect it's the same as Dangun Feveron, check for magic EEPROM value
if not reset PCB. The fix was simple, patch out check and patch out checksum.

However the BL code is address swapped and data swapped. If you're good
at this kind of stuff:

http://www.mamedev.org/source/src/mame/ ... ypt.c.html

Let me know and I'll let you have a stab at the program code.

rtw

zakk · Post by **zakk** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 9:21 am

I've got work related stuff I need to (potentially) concentrate on in the next few months, and I wouldn't have the willpower to not work on the fun stuff instead.

I might hit you up in a few months.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 9:40 am

The way to get around Paypal fees is to start up a charity. What's smarter, since they're donations anyway (and probably small amounts) just mail the person cash.