maybe this is taboo if so please delete it, but what about pooling together our "pheonix" roms for resurecting cps2 boards? i have about a dozen id be willing to share if theres any interest (free ofcourse). maybe assembler would like to host if i send you the roms?
explain this to me, I have no idea what you mean by phoenix. I thought cps2 was pretty much emulated and done with
The phoenix roms are something razoola hacked together when he found out how to run code on a dead cps2 board. Part of the problem with them is that people have been killing working cps2 boards so they can run specific games, which if they started out with a rare undumped game is quite annoying. smf
these are not emulator roms, these are roms to bring a dead CPS2 board back to life, by loading them into the eeproms of the board. there are a couple of ways to get hold of them of which all mean theyre quite costly which is why im suggesting the pool.. smf> say what?, if the game is dead and can be brought to life it was already dumped, as i understand there are very few boards which allow switching roms and there are only 1 or 2 games that arent dumped afaik?
Point: Razoola did the work to create the Phoenix roms... ...that said, I'm gonna take a not so wild guess and say that it is probably illegal for him to modify the CPS2 games... ...but be also gets pissed (see here) when people distribute his work. That said, I'm not one of the people who believe that Razoola is some sort of Demigod for doing this. I'm sure theres somebody on this very board capable of doing the same thing. Collecting them for whatever purpose is shady...but the very fact that they exist is shady. I don't like them for the fact that they scribble "Phoenix Edition" on the game...AND I hate modding. For the unitiated, Phoenix roms are roms created by this Razoola fellow for CPS2 games. They can be used to revive dead CPS2 boards...and make it so you never have to replace the batteries.
actually there are plenty of "pheonix" roms around that razoola never touched.. hes not the only one to break the cps2 encryption, just the first. and offcourse he doesnt like them being distributed freely amongst CPS2 owners, after all he charges €30 for a set.
there is no hardware mod needed to resurrect a CPS2 game, you simply burn the new roms then swap them. (requires an eeprom burner) i dont know the details of how the encryption works.
For an indepth look at the encryption itself you might want to try: http://mamelife.blogspot.com/ Nicola Salmoria's work on it has been great to follow. The encryption boiled down to its very basics takes the address of the encrypted data and scrambles it with one secret key to create a subkey. This subkey is then scrambled with the encrypted data present at that address PLUS a second secret key to produce the unencrypted plaintext. To be honest i think a productive course of action would be to try and replicate the proceedure of creating phoenixed roms ourselves. If the process was well documented enough it could be replicated without having to host anything illegal. http://cps2shock.retrogames.com/suicide.html Seems like the only info i can find at the moment. A couple of courses of action would be to try and create some unencrypted roms .. the XOR files that used to be distributed with romsets should help somewhat. Once some of those are sorted maybe comparing some of them with already phoenixed roms will highlight areas that need work ? MrS
If Razoola ever discontinued support or selling of the fixes I'd totally advocate making a known repository for them. Until then he should be the only source for quality and respects sake.
I would have to agree with that. Unless Razoola stops offering his fixes, we shouldn't go making a big stash of them. Although you should personally hold onto whatever you have for yourself and back it up, atleast if you bought it from him. From everything I've read and thought about with the CPS2 and how the decrypted games work it's fairly complicated (though not impossible, another skilled person could do it with the info out there) and he has spent alot of time making certain what he sells you works correctly as he's tested it and I imagine if something should go wrong he would offer to make it right. smf, what do you mean exactly by a rare game and killing a game? From what you said it sounds like you're worried about undumped revisions being lost, or worried about people converting some other game (like the Quiz thing) and replacing all the ROM chips to make it into another. I would think that would be awfully expensive though wouldn't it? And when you send ROMs to Razoola, he'd be able to dump your ROM chips and see if your revision was undumped before he goes erasing and rewriting them.
I don't see how they fit within the focus of the community. These are more like "hacks" (useful ones) rather than hard to come by games (unreleased, beta, etc.).
I think the point of it being here as that it's hidden from normal view which random people that join the forum can't see.
I don't think we need step on any toes. I am sure there are far more motivated arcade centric boards out there, and that plenty of people have images of the roms. I don't think it's a good idea.
These get rid of the very, very useful and critically acclaimed suicide function of the CPS2, though. Regardless of your stance, the guy is making dough off of Capcom's code. Period. I don't see how he can get huffy about people swapping his work when it's blatantly illegal to begin with. Even if he pawns it off as a "service", I'm sure there's all types rules being broken when you pop open the CPS2 board, hack the roms, etc. etc.
There are various regions that have hardly any games dumped, like brazil. The first thing anyone out there is going to do is to cut the battery off a working board and then burn a set of roms for hyper street fighter 2 anniversay edition. 1 or 2 games undumped is still important too. Much easier to reprogram the key on the board. Some work has been done on this, although the existance of the phoenix roms has probably demotivated the person working on it. Creating the phoenix roms involves rewriting the code as the memory map changes when the decryption dies. Most of razoola's decisions have been very bad for everyone, except for the OMG fr33 g4m0rx5!!!!1 crowd. smf
True but when you deliberately make an arcade system fully knowing that at some point your clientele will have to come back to you to revive a brick you can't look me straight in the eye and say that the money they make for "reviving" your board isn't 90% profit. To me this is a deliberate fault built into the system to guarentee future sales with the excuse of protecting their IP. By the time Capcom is gone and unable to even think of offering this service it's likely that the games will have lapsed into public domain and we won't even have to give this a second thought. Course by then it might be just as likely that not a single board will function and the phoenix roms long lost or extremely hard to locate.
