CPS-2 inquiries

[Wildkat]

Like Catty said, they're called suicide boards for a reason. IIRC, when the battery goes dead it wipes the boards' chips (EEPROM? ROM? What are they again?) of the game itself, so you have a dead board in your hands. Cute, isn't it?

its plain old volitile RAM. Thats where the problem is. Loose the battery back-up and poof a portion of the game needed to function is gone IIRC it was the decryption keys for the game proms, so you could still dump the proms, but they were encrypted and without the keys, useless.

It was attempt at curbing PCB piracy as emulation really didnt exist much at the time, and it did work, but it has a nasty side effect.

[Shapermc]

Well if your weary about your battery replacement skills try THIS! 4 year warrenty is not bad.

Also suicide is not permenant. Razoola will try to help out the recently dead if they bite it.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: With that rising from the dead that Razoola can do, you no longer even NEED the battery. It is recomended that you remove it then leave it off.

[Frogacuda]

CPS2Shock has has some success with restoring dead boards and re-uploading data, but you have Progear, right? No one's lent them a ProGear board so there's no Progear ROM dump to upload yet.

[Shapermc]

CPS2Shock has has some success with restoring dead boards and re-uploading data, but you have Progear, right? No one's lent them a ProGear board so there's no Progear ROM dump to upload yet.

That is not true IIRC. It is just too recent of a release to produce a dump for "public" emulation release. None the less if you ship the whole thing to him he can take care of all that, esp. if you have an undumped version of something.

[Matt]

Brillant... not, if emulation and bootlegs were their problem they could've done it without using a faulty battery system...

Please tell us how, then

It's true that the batteries are a pain in the butt for us collectors, but it's not much of an issue for those who run arcade games for profit (which is Capcom's only target customer base). And because of it, there are almost no bootleg CPS2 games. Even though the CPS2 has been emulated now, pirate boards are still practically nonexistent.

As it is, if you change your batteries regularly, there's no need to worry in the first place.

How long does the battery last, 3 to 4 years or 8 to 9... that's a big difference there so does anyone know? Also how much is it to recharge the board if need be?

They last longer than you think. Just last week, in fact, I did a battery replacement in a 9-year-old SSF2 Turbo PCB that was still fine. Of course, you often hear stories of guys with 6 or 7 year old PCBs that have died suddenly, so you shouldn't count on getting that much life out of them.

If a PCB is being run for profit, the battery will last much longer than if the board is in storage, since it's not being drained while the PCB is on. If you're a collector who only turns your PCBs on when you play them, you should be able to count on 5 years at the very least, so if you change them every 4 years you should be very safe.

BTW, I've still got plenty of 1/2AA lithium cells FS in the Trade Depot .

[Werewolf]

Please tell us how, then

Well for one they could've had a warning display before the battery dies, and they could've made it easier to change batteries... even for the arcade owner it is downtime for them which means no profits from those games, so they ether have to do the work themselves or send it to Capcom which would be more likely because I'm sure the biggest thing on the operators mind all the time is "are my CPS2 batteries low" instead of trying to run their business

[voltz]

I've heard they're a real bitch when the battery does go out. On some emulator site I can't put my finger on, there was discussion on how to bring a PCB back to life and I think it just involves some process about restoring the security information or something like that.