Hey Everyone, As I understand it, unlicensed games from Game Express require some kind of special system card. Does anyone know what exactly it does? Because it seems like it limits the amount of consoles the games would work for since not only do you need the card, but also the extra RAM which only some systems have. Any experts have ideas about this?
I have only run the card on a Duo R and all the games I have work fine. I remember the covers do say "PC Engine Duo Series" so I assume that they would only work on Duo as the RAM is onboard rather then being part of the card.
Interesting. Still left wondering what the card actually is needed for. I mean, couldn't a regular system card fit the bill? Or was there some kind of copy protection that prevents people from using official cards?
One would assume that because of the time these came out, they want to be able to protect the games from copying as in 1994/1995 CD Writers were starting to become affordable and these games would have been heavily pirated. The GE System Card has a 24K rom which I assume is enough for the boot picture, load the game up and to access the CD drive and being incompatable with the normal system card would mean that people would have to buy the game with it's CD ROM drive and card (for 9800 yen...). Ah the good old days when things like this existed as PCs were too expensive and home computers were generally too basic and limited.
The Games Express card may just contain a BIOS ROM. Emulator source code might give some hints. There is a good chance that you can just flash the dumped Games Express System Card ROM onto one of the PCE Flash Cards and play the games just fine. The CD-ROM system itself contains some RAM I believe, and then the Super CDROM added more. I think it was something like 64K built in to the CDROM and then Super CD has 256K. Not certain.
The GamesExpress (GE) carts were used to circumvent the protection of the console that otherwise would prevent you to play the unlicensed/pr0n GE games. Even on a Duo/R/RX console with an ArcadeCard installed you won't be able to run a GE game, so it's not a memory issue. On the other hand, with a GE cart (or the GE BIOS on a flash cart) you can run all GE games, even the copied ones on CD-R.
