News:2007-06-11 - CPS3 Decrypted
From Dev-Scene
The mighty citadel CPS-3 (Capcom Play System 3) has finally been reverse-engineered after near 11 years of holding strong against any advancement in emulation. It seems that Andreas Naive is a very highly skilled at decryption and has been able to extract the encryption methods and keys for the BIOS and game roms.
Being designed to automatically self-destruct when any small amount of modification or tampering was detected, Deleting all the data and decryption keys from the system - This made the unit a very expensive paperweight, both unplayable and unrecoverable. This caused the CPS3 to become one of the holy grails of emulation.
While the BIOS, game data and decryption keys have been a Tough Nut to Crack. The drivers for the other pieces of hardware have been mastered for years. This has allowed developers to very quickly jump into active emulation development.
This means thanks to the work of Andreas Naive and the MAME development teams, the dream of playing Street Fighter III on my new MAME cabinet could finally be a reality. While there is still a lot of work to be done before we see emulation of the CPS-III games in MAME, this is still a pretty epic moment in emulation history.