CPS-1 SUICIDE BATTERY????

[mrcram]

I've heard alot about CP1 board from capcom having this suicide battery problem.  I just bought a final fight board, does anyone know if there is a suicide battery on this board? someone gots to know. thankz

[Knoxximus]

Look it up at klov.com.

It'll tell you.....

[D10]

I've heard alot about CP1 board from capcom having this suicide battery problem.  I just bought a final fight board, does anyone know if there is a suicide battery on this board? someone gots to know. thankz

The CPS-1 games known to use suicide batteries are King Of Dragons, Knights Of The Round, Three Wonders, Captain Commando, The Punisher, Saturday Night Slam Masters, Cadillacs And Dinosaurs, Warriors Of Fate, Quiz & Dragons and the Japanese version of Varth: Operation Thunderstorm.

[mattv]

No; Capcom didn't introduce the suicide batteries until CPS1.5 and Final fight doesn't have one. Great choice of game to get by the way! Probably the first "moden" beat-em-up - a modern classic

The CPS games that Do have a battery and are succeptable to CPS suicide are

Three Wonders
King of Dragons
Knights of the Round
Captain Commando
Quiz and Dragons
Capcom World 2
Varth (Japanese version only - US and ETC have no battery)
Warriors of Fate (TWO suicide batteries)
Cadillacs and Dinosaurs
Punisher
Saturday Night Slam Masters
Muscle Bomber
Muscle Bomber Duo

So you should have no problems at all.

You can find out all about CPS suicide, and how to fix it here
http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/dead.html

Oh, and ease up on the all caps eh?

[USSEnterprise]

What's a suicide battery?

[Stingray]

It's a battery that supplies power to ram on the board. When it dies the code in the ram dissapears and the board no longer works.

-S

[monkeybomb]

It atatches to your watch and You swallow it if you ever get arrested.



It's a battery that goes dead if you don't have the game turned on for a while.  If the battery goes dead the game is unusable.  It cannot be revived by changing the battery either.  There is a lot more info on the suicide batteries for CPS2 games here:

http://cps2shock.retrogames.com/suicide.html

[USSEnterprise]

oh, so the game is stored on a RAM chip as opposed to a ROM chip? I get it. And when the battery stops supplying power, the RAM loses the data

[Stingray]

Not the game itself, just some encryption/ decryption stuff IIRC.

-S

[Q*Bert_OP]

It atatches to your watch and You swallow it if you ever get arrested.

http://cps2shock.retrogames.com/suicide.html

 

[StephenH]

Some CPS-1 games have a suicide battery.  These can be repaired by using the instructions at http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/dead.html.  You need a solidering iron, a some blank EEPROMs, an EEPROM Programmer, and to do some rewiring of the board, by connecting a few pins differently.  Some games are harder to fix than others.  You can also send your board back to Capcom, and pay them to fix it.

As for the CPS-2 games going dead, to revive them, you either need to send your board to Capcom or to Razoola of CPS-2 shock to get it fixed.  To fix CPS-2, it takes unsoldering the battery, and replacing with a heavily modified, heavily patched, decrypted ROM.   Additionally, they seem to have a capacitor, so you can safely disconnect the battery and solider in a new one, if you do it within under an hours time, according to http://cps2shock.retrogames.com .

[babydickonboard]

what a dumb thing for capcom to include

[mattv]

That depends on your point of view I guess.

The trouble with arcade boards is that different games running on the same hardware (EG SFII and pinikies) are worth different amounts.

EPROMS are not the most diffucult things in the entire world to copy and shortly after the release of Street Fighter II there were litterally thousands of copied bootleg boards floating around. When you bear in mind that these things uesd to retail for well over $1000 each this was a major problem for Capcom.

So what to do? Simple, encrypt the EEPROMS. Only one problem with that is that the decryption keys are alos stored in some kind of Non-volitile memory on the game board so it's pretty trivial to copy those too.

And thaqt is where the Idea of the "suicide battery" came from. If the decryption keys are stored in volitile memory (ram), then if they remove the chip that contains those keys from the board to try and dump it the keys dissapear and they can't dump them. Brilliant!

"The battery will last for years, who will want to play these games 10 years in he future?" is how the argument went. Well, now it's 10 years in the future - and people still want to plat 'em

In terms of a bootleg protection device the suicide battery was a huge success - it killed the CPS1(.5) bootleg industry stone dead, and to the best of my knowledge there were never any CPS2 bootlegs at all.

Unlike music sharing or P2P game copying I DO have a major problem with bootlegs of software that is actively used to make money. Unscruplous operators would buy bootleg boards at 1/20th the proce of the real thing and proceed to make MORE money than honest operators becasue they could put more machines on the floor. So yeah, two thumbs up for the suicide battery!

[TechnicalMonkey]

Some CPS-1 games have a suicide battery.  These can be repaired by using the instructions at http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/dead.html.  You need a solidering iron, a some blank EEPROMs, an EEPROM Programmer, and to do some rewiring of the board, by connecting a few pins differently...

The battery backed C boards that held the encryption for CPS1 & CPS1.5 games can now be completely be fixed from dead to running with a new battery. Look for a man from Spain named Eduardo Cruz or the handle "edcross". He has successfully made a product using an Arduino Dev board.

I can't wait for him to work on CPS2 games.