How Capcom's clever CPS2 Arcade Game Copy Protection stopped bootleg games | MVG

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.

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.

Battery: did you do it? Capcom: yes. Battery: what did it cost? Capcom: *Teal Screen*

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.

Denuvo : I'm the most advanced DRM in the world This thing : that's cute

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 find these copy protection videos you make incredibly fascinating! I think I've watched them all! LOL

Screwed bootleggers. Screwed legitimate owners too.

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.

Enjoyed that. I never knew anything about those acarde boards or how they worked. Thanks mate.

Copy protection on game/computer systems, I love learning about this stuff! Great video!

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.

Man I really love learning about this shit.

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!

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.

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 :(

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!

Oh these are somehow the most interesting episodes, things i vaguely remember but now am reminded of again. Thank you for them man.

Loving the copy protection videos, keep them up dude :)