CPS-3 Encryption Scheme Broken

by Mike Bendel June 9, 2007 @ 3:27 pm

It’s taken awhile, ten years to be exact, but Andreas Naive has successfully managed to break the protection on Capcom’s CPS-3 arcade system board. The CPS-3 powered less than a dozen arcade classics, including JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Red Earth, and Street Fighter III.

The security system of the CPS-3 was rather advanced for its time. Any tampering to the game’s security cartridge would result in the decryption key being erased, thereby rendering the respective cartridge useless.

So, the decryption is broken, what does this all mean? In one word: Emulation. Now that the decryption task is done, the folks over at MAME have already started work on a CPS-3 emulator.

David Haywood’s Homepage – Haze’s Mame WIP [MAME]

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