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Time Crisis Copy Protection
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Quacker Blaster:
I was looking at the games MAMEUI supported and noticed Time Crisis 2 and 3 aren't supported due to copy protection not being emulated. I tried a Google search to see how the copy protection was implemented in those games as a curiosity and got nothing. Does anyone know how the copy protection works in those games or is it still a mystery? Any assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Quacker Blaster
paigeoliver:
Copy protection in most games involves a custom chip or chips that decrypt encrypted data and do other assorted voodoo. Said chip or chips are often inside a big old brick of epoxy.

If the data is just encrypted then the encryption can often be broken with a trojan program or hardware add on that will read the data after it has come through the decryption.

It can get a lot more involved than that though, that is old school 1986 era security. Newer games can have even more involved copy protection.
Quacker Blaster:

--- Quote from: paigeoliver on August 29, 2013, 10:33:40 pm ---Copy protection in most games involves a custom chip or chips that decrypt encrypted data and do other assorted voodoo. Said chip or chips are often inside a big old brick of epoxy.

If the data is just encrypted then the encryption can often be broken with a trojan program or hardware add on that will read the data after it has come through the decryption.

It can get a lot more involved than that though, that is old school 1986 era security. Newer games can have even more involved copy protection.

--- End quote ---
So Time Crisis 2 and 3 used encryption? If so then no one has managed to decrypt it yet? I am checking it against MAMEUI 0.149U1 info and it states for the copy protection hasn't be emulated yet. Any assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Quacker Blaster
WindDrake:
http://mamedev.org/source/src/mame/drivers/namcos23.c.html

Namco (Super) System 23 was a pretty complicated beast. The MAME preliminary driver is a good bit of reading.
paigeoliver:
Just looking at the driver shows the game has a dozen Namco custom chips and custom programmed PIC microcontroller. I don't know how much of that is security related, but it could be pretty nasty if it is more than a couple chips.
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