Hey guys Im typing on mobile and the formating is messed up so Its gonna be little messy.. so I know someone who bought the Idolmaster arcade(namco 256 i believe) and hes trying to do some rearrange for the hardwares to make it smaller. Hes kinda worried about making a mistake and ruin any hardwares, so hes looking for a way to make backup for the datas. I heard hdd is not hard to do, but the security dongle(ps2 memory card sized one) isnt something he can just easily do. I was searching, saw some ppl say thats possible to make backup for the dongle. so can anyone tell me what are the ways he can try by himself, or someone he can ask for it?
I have heard that the only way to backup the data from the dongle is with some sort of fancy IC chip reader that requires you to desolder the chip from the board due to the dongle's encryption. That's just what I heard though, nothing anyone without crazy electronics knowledge could do.
There are a few people who can make 2x6 dongle backups but regardless, there is little chance your friend will break it unless he tries to do physical damage to it. I would how ever consider a backup of the hdd since those can get damaged over time (i've had a taiko hdd that had bad sectors on it).
You don't need to solder anything, you just need to build/get a small thing that attaches to all the legs in that System 246/256 memory cards data chip. By doing this no need to decrypt anything as you can change the data easily. There was some tutorial long ago but forgot where it is
I was once involved in some experiments with a Namco System 246. It had a custom PlayStation 2 TOOL BOOT ROM, with two MCMAN modules; one for the dongle (MCMAN) and one for normal memory cards (MCMANO). The dongle files that I got to study were from Konami. It had a backdoor into the system, which allowed the program on the dongle (slot 1) to be updated with files supplied on a normal PlayStation 2 memory card inserted into slot 2. mc1:START is the boot file that is copied over. I don't seem to have recorded what sort of file it was, so I guess that it is a normal PlayStation 2 ELF. We placed a custom version of uLaunchELF as mc1:START, which the dongle copied over and booted. The version of uLaunchELF had a its own custom version of MCMAN, which authenticated slot 1 for the dongle and slot 2 for PS2 memory cards. It also had a custom UDNL module to alter the IOP boot process a little, so that the FILEIO module from a retail PlayStation 2 console will be used instead (the one in the ROM is too new). So if the backdoor exists on all dongles (other than just Konami dongles), then it should be possible to back up other dongles just any dongle that can be sacrificed and with suitable software. Existing homebrew PS2 software were likely not designed to be not dependent on the board-specific modules in the PS2's ROM and were designed to work with the modules found in a retail PlayStation 2's ROM, and hence will not boot correctly on a System 246. Unfortunately, that means that one dongle will have to be sacrificed for this purpose. It has to be first backed up via external means. I don't have any tools for dumping the dongles for now, as one was never made. One can be made, but I don't know if it is even considered a viable method of preserving dongles because one dongle will have to first be sacrificed.
sp193- I've dumped over 200 dongles for the 246/256/S256 up to now (a lot of duplicates or alternate versions, as there's only 51 individual games), and MANY (but definitely not all) of them have SOME method for "self-updating" as you speak of. Sadly, there are few standards on this, and none of them are as simple as the START method Konami (stupidly?) left there for us to tinker with and use for executing custom code. This is in part because for the 2X6, the majority of the core game code for most games is run from the dongle, not the HDD/optical media.
