
MAME devs are cracking open arcade chips to get around DRM - sohkamyung
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/07/mame-devs-are-cracking-open-arcade-chips-to-get-around-drm/
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khedoros1
The arcade cabinet repairman down in the comments has an interesting
perspective. When the machines were new, behavior of the ASICs would've been
incredibly important; hard to build a good knock-off if the original dev did
something impressive using custom hardware. It seems to me like most of the
benefit of that is eaten up by the sheer power of current hardware, though.
It's more feasible to brute-force your way through things in realtime in
software than it would have been then.

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koz1000
But note that it didn't stop the counterfeiters. It just slowed them down. In
the arcade business, having that window of time was enough to get the
production run done and not have any interference with knockoffs.

Another lesser-known reason for these chips was to lock in a serial number to
help identify distributors that were selling outside of their territories.
That was the primary reason for the "security" chip in a lot of the pinball
machines I worked on back in the 90s.

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Boothroid
Great comment on that page, excerpt:

'Since I was working for a company that bought and sold mainly 'conversion
kits' (containing new electronics for a new title, cabinet graphics, etc) and
we bought and re-packaged old titles, we'd get old PCBs.'

I think I missed my calling in life!

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Leynos
Great to see this getting more visibility. This is fantastic work that CAPS0ff
are doing.

