MAME devs are cracking open arcade chips to get around DRM

arstechnica.com

27 points·sohkamyung··4 comments

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.

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.

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!

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com