CPS2 18 in One - Anybody have any experience with it ?

[tommyinajar]

I've got a few CPS2 boards, and was thinking about buying another one and I saw a " CPS2 18 in1" that  supposedly used  NO EMULATION! (their words)

Is that at all true, legal , and / or does anyone have one of these - Any problems ?


Thanks

[Haze]

they're modified cps2 / cps1 boards with custom sub-boards containing a bunch of flash roms and MCU to control the menu / rom banking.

Legal?  No..

Emulation?  No..

IIRC half the games are hacks of the other games with bosses enabled etc.  They also have various glitches like old versions of emulators (sometimes worse) due to them not taking into account the differing priority / tile range accesses properly. On the CPS1 ones the qsound games are also hacked to use non-qsound roms from other games.   Like those multi neogeo game carts quality also seems pretty poor and you'll sometimes find the sound / gfx are completely broken on certain games (probably bad flash roms used)  The CPS2 ones are also produced from the Phoenix verisons of the roms which your milage may vary with anyway (those things had to be hacked up quite a lot to run unencrypted and people have reported glitches caused by that in some of them, certain special moves crashing the games etc. )

So.. I wouldn't bother with them unless the hardware interests you, but you can't hack them much further (in any interesting way) because the menu is controller by an MCU.  In this case just because they run on 'original' hardware doesn't make them any better than emulation because they'd had to be hacked so much to do so.

[SavannahLion]

The CPS2 ones are also produced from the Phoenix verisons of the roms which your milage may vary with anyway (those things had to be hacked up quite a lot to run unencrypted and people have reported glitches caused by that in some of them, certain special moves crashing the games etc. )

Really? I thought the Phoenix modification was a "cure" to the dead battery problem and the only solution to fix a dead CPS2 board. So you're saying that it's actually better to have a non-Phoenixed board and to replace the battery every so often?

[Haze]

The CPS2 ones are also produced from the Phoenix verisons of the roms which your milage may vary with anyway (those things had to be hacked up quite a lot to run unencrypted and people have reported glitches caused by that in some of them, certain special moves crashing the games etc. )

Really? I thought the Phoenix modification was a "cure" to the dead battery problem and the only solution to fix a dead CPS2 board. So you're saying that it's actually better to have a non-Phoenixed board and to replace the battery every so often?

absolutely, one it's phoenixed it's running heavily hacked code.

The entire process of phoenixing the games involves taking an decrypted code block, and decrypted data block, then (with a few pointers taken from comparing alt region sets of the same revision) merging the areas of decrypted code and data, first automatically then manually by going over a multitude of cases where the sets don't quite match up, or the encrypted bytes happened to match so looked like data etc.  Get one wrong, and the game is liable to screw up at some random point.  In addition the video registers end up overlaying an area of RAM, so if the game uses that area of RAM the code that accesses it also has to be hacked.  Again you have to hack the video register accesses, and any ram accesses that end up accessing the area of ram where the video registers now live.  Mess one thing up and you'll introduce subtle bugs that the originals don't have.

Certainly clever, and a non-trivial amount of work to create in the first place, and without doubt useful if a board is well and truly dead, but, keeping your old board alive is the only way to ensure that you're running original code, as the code was meant to run and being able to know that any glitches you see are due to bugs in the original program and not subtle new ones created by the extensive hacking.

On legal ground the phoenix sets could easily be considered bootlegs, operating them in a commercial environment may not actually be legal (Capcom offer their own repair service at cost, and running Phoenix versions on location is akin to running cracked software in the office)   Also features of the phoenix sets like bypassing the game region likewise make them even more legally questionable (the games are sold and licensed for use in specific regions)

It's rather sad to see people killing otherwise working boards to phoenix them, because it makes finding truly original Capcom sets harder (and bootleggers in china / hk have been buying up less popular boards, killing them and converting them to more popular titles and now these multi-game boards, so who knows which sets have been lost in that process)

There are still cases where original boards are probably needed to decrypt the games, IIRC the program data is so short on Puzzle Fighter that the only way to decrypt any alt regions that may show up is with a working board, so if somebody was to kill and phoenix a Brazil Puzzle Fighter board just so they didn't have to worry about the battery anymore that would be doubly horrific.

So yes, they're good if your board is already dead, and have saved many boards from being trash (Capcom won't repair boards sold out of their intended region), however, killing boards specifically to use the phoenix sets isn't such a good idea.

[SavannahLion]

That was... a bit more than what I asked for.

Yeah, Puzzle Fighter is one of the working boards (last I checked about eight months ago) I have. It has no cab to call home though. My other CPS2 has a damaged connector and I can't get anything useful out of it right now. No idea what game it even is.

I guess I better seriously consider doing one of the battery modifications to it sometime soon.

Too bad no one came up with a way to replace the SRAM with something a bit more durable. Oh well.

[Haze]

That was... a bit more than what I asked for.

Yeah, Puzzle Fighter is one of the working boards (last I checked about eight months ago) I have. It has no cab to call home though. My other CPS2 has a damaged connector and I can't get anything useful out of it right now. No idea what game it even is.

I guess I better seriously consider doing one of the battery modifications to it sometime soon.

Too bad no one came up with a way to replace the SRAM with something a bit more durable. Oh well.

Yeah, a method to actually reprogram the encryption chip would have been better (still wouldn't solve the problem of Chinese guys reprogramming boards with other games, but at least you could know the code was original and unhacked)

The answer was rather long because I like people to understand the processes involved, so I tend to try and give as many details as possible, you never know, somebody reading the post might find the details really interesting.  Educating people on what's involved in certain tasks is never a bad thing :-)

[codenamed]

I had one of these boards and it ran flawlessly purchased through welink and sold on klov when I got bored with it. Checkout frizzlefrides cps2 18in1 cab on klov. These boards are cool just hope you dont get a dud as return shippin to china is spendy.

The phoenix version can be turned on and off by the way for every game the board even supports auxillary kick harness for 4 players. The suicide battery on cps2 boards is why there arent many left in the wild dont see a problem with this board except it only has 18 games.

[FrizzleFried]

I've had mine for a month or so and love it for the most part.  The menu system is a little cumbersome,  but overall the board is well worth the asking price.  I've heard of some bad boards being sold,  but luckily mine seems to be running strong.  The A-board does warm up nicely,  so adding a fan blowing across the board set may help keep things nice and cool.  My only semi-major complaint would be there is no high-score save feature.

[Haze]

The phoenix version can be turned on and off by the way

This doesn't make sense.  The encryption chip on the boards is dead, it can't run anything except the Phoenix versions, even if the phoenix messages get hacked out.  There is simply no way the 'dead' board can run the original encrypted code.

(If the bootleggers really wanted they could probably create their own encryption chip, and allow it to be programmed etc. but none of the ones I've seen do this, probably because it's cheaper and easier for them to just to use the phoenix ones, or use emulation)

Right now killing a board is like murdering your grandmother, you might be able to give the impression she's still alive by attaching strings to her arms and legs, but she won't be the real deal.