The History of Capcom Play System 1/2/3

Capcom Play System 1/2/3

The History of Capcom Play System Information Collected from Wikipedia :

Capcom Play System 1 ( CPS 1 ) Wikipedia information :

Manufacturer: Capcom

Release date: July 1988

CPU: Motorola 68000 (@ 10 MHz)

Display: Raster, 384 � 224 pixels (Horizontal), 4096 colors

Input: 8-way joystick, from 3 to 6 buttons

The CP System (CP???? shipi shisutemu?) or CPS-1 is an arcade system board developed by Capcom that ran game software stored on removable ROM cartridges. More than two dozen arcade titles were released for CPS-1, before Capcom shifted game development over to its successor, the CPS-2.

Capcom's Street Fighter II series is perhaps the best known franchise within the CPS game library. The first three titles in the series, the original title, Champion Edition, and Hyper Fighting edition were all developed on CPS-1 and highly successful.

History

After a number of arcade game boards designed to run only one game, Capcom embarked upon a project to produce a system board that could be used to run multiple games, in order to reduce hardware costs and make the system more appealing to arcade operators.

The system was plagued by many bootleg versions of its games. In particular, there were so many bootleg versions of Street Fighter II, that they were more common in some countries than the official version. This problem was virtually eliminated by Capcom in the later CP System II.

The CP System hardware was also utilized in Capcom's unsuccessful attempt at home console market penetration, the CPS Changer (Capcom's answer to the Neo Geo AES).

CP System's 10 MHz 68000 CPU and graphics IC

Technical specifications

    CPU:

        Primary: Motorola 68000 @ 10 MHz (some later boards 12 MHz)

        Secondary: Zilog Z-80 @ 3.579 MHz

    Sound Chips:

        Yamaha YM2151 @ 3.579 MHz

        Oki OKI6295 @ 7.576 MHz, Stereo

    Display:

        Resolution: Raster, 384x224 @ 59.6294 Hz

        Color Depth: 12 bit RGB with a 4 bit brightness value

        Colors available: 4096

        Onscreen colors: 3072 (192 global palettes with 16 colors each)

    Sprites:

        Simultaneously displayable: 256 (per scanlines)

        Sizes: 16x16, max. 16 colors (15 unique + 1 transparent)

        Vertical and Horizontal Flipping capability

    Tiles: Sizes 8x8, 16x16, 32x32 with 16 colors (15 unique + 1 transparent)

    Tile Maps: 3 Maps, 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048 pixel

    68K RAM: 64 KB WORK RAM + 192 KB VRAM(Shadow)

    PPU: 192 KB VRAM + 16 KB CACHE RAM

    Z80 RAM: 2 KB WORK RAM

Capcom Play System 1

Some Capcom Play System 1 Game name:

1. Forgotten Worlds
2. Ghouls'n Ghosts
3. Strider
4. Dynasty Wars
5. Willow
6. Final Fight
7. 1941: Counter Attack
8. Magic Sword - Heroic Fantasy
9. Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
10. Three Wonders

Capcom Play System 2 ( CPS 2 ) Wikipedia information :

Manufacturer: Capcom

Release date: September 1993

CPU: Motorola 68000 (@ 16 MHz)

Display: Raster (horizontal),

384�224 resolution,

4096 colors on screen,

16,777,216 color palette

Input: 8-way joystick, from 3 to 6 buttons

The CP System II (CP????II shipi shisutemu tsu?) or CPS-2 is an arcade system board that Capcom first used in 1993 for Super Street Fighter II. It was the successor to their previous CP System and Capcom Power System Changer arcade hardware and was succeeded by the CP System III hardware in 1996.

History:

The earlier Capcom system board, the original CP System (or CPS-1), while successful, was very vulnerable to bootleggers making unauthorized copies of the games. In order to rectify the situation, Capcom took the CP System hardware (with QSound) with minimal changes and employed encryption on the program ROMs to prevent software piracy. Due to the encryption, the system was never bootlegged until unencrypted program data became available.

The CP System II consists of two separate parts; the A board, which connects to the JAMMA harness and contains components common between all CP System II games, and the B board, which contains the game itself. The relationship between the A and B board is basically the same as that between a home video game console and cartridge. CP System II A and B boards are color-coded by region, and each board can only be used with its same-colored mate. The exception to this is that the blue and green boards can be used together.

The B boards hold battery-backed memory containing decryption keys needed for the games to run. As time passes, these batteries lose their charge and the games stop functioning, because the CPU cannot execute any code without the decryption keys. This is known to hobbyists as the "suicide battery". It is possible to bypass the original battery and swap it out with a new one in-circuit, but this must be done before the original falls below 2V or the keys will be lost.

Consequently the board would just die anyway, meaning even if used legally it would not play after a finite amount of time (Unless a fee was paid to Capcom to replace it).

Due to the heavy encryption, it was believed for a long time that CP System II emulation was next to impossible. However, in January 2001, the CPS-2 Shock group was able to obtain unencrypted program data by hacking into the hardware, which they distributed as XOR difference tables to produce the unencrypted data from the original ROM images, making emulation possible, as well as restoring cartridges that had been erased because of the suicide system.

In January 2007, the encryption method was fully reverse-engineered by Andreas Naive and Nicola Salmoria. It has been determined that the encryption employs two four-round Feistel ciphers with a 64-bit key. The algorithm was thereafter implemented in this state for all known CPS-2 games in MAME.

Region colors:

    Blue: U.S.A., Canada, and Europe

    Green: Japan

    Orange: South America

    Gray: Asia

    Pink: Brazil

    Yellow: "Region 0" (available by rental only)

    Black: "Region 0" incorporated A and B board in the same unit

Technical specifications:

    CPU:

        Primary: Capcom DL-1625 (encrypted 68000) @ 16 MHz

        Sound: Kabuki DL-030P (encrypted Z80) @ 8 MHz

    Capcom custom chipset:

        GPU: CPS-A & CPS-B Graphics Processors @ 16 MHz (same as CPS-1)

        Sound chip: Q1 QSound Processor @ 60 MHz

        DRAM Refresh Controller: DL-2227

        I/O Controller: DL-1123

    Display:

        Active resolution: 384�224 pixels (progressive scan)

        Overscan resolution: 512�262 (262 scanlines)

        Sprites: 900 on screen

    Colors:

        Depth: 32-bit[1] (RGBA)

        Palette: 16,777,216 colors (24-bit)

        Alpha transparency: 256 levels (8-bit)

        Colors on screen: 4096 (12-bit)

        Colors per tile: 16 (4-bit)

    RAM: 

        1328 KB (1 MB FPM DRAM, 304 KB SRAM)

        A-Board: 1 MB FPM DRAM, 280 KB SRAM (256 KB video, 16 KB I/O, 8 KB sound)

        B-Board: 16 KB SRAM (2� 8 KB)

        Communication Board: 8 KB SRAM

        Maximum ROM capacity: 322 Mbit (40.25 MB)

Capcom Play System 2

Some Capcom Play System 2 Game name:

1. Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers
2. Super Street Fighter II: Tournament Battle
3. Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom
4. Alien vs. Predator
5. X-Men: Children of the Atom
6. Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara
7. Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
8. Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters
9. Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes

Capcom Play System 3 ( CPS 3 ) Wikipedia information :

The CP System III (CP????III shipi shisutemu suri?) or CPS-3 is an arcade system board that was first used by Capcom in 1996 with the arcade game Red Earth. It was the second successor to the CP System arcade hardware, following the CP System II. It would be the last proprietary system board Capcom would produce before moving to the more common Taito Type X system boards used in Japan.

History:

The CP System III became the final arcade system board designed by Capcom. It features a security mechanism; games are supplied on a CD, which contains the encrypted game contents, and a security cartridge containing the game BIOS and the SH-2 CPU with integrated decryption logic, with the per-game key stored in battery-backed SRAM. When the CP System III board is first powered on, the contents of the CD are loaded into a bank of SIMMs on the motherboard, where it is executed. The program code is then decrypted at run time via the security cartridge. The security cartridge is sensitive to any sort of tampering, which will result in the decryption key being erased and the cartridge being rendered useless. Games become unplayable when the battery inside the security cartridge dies.

In June 2007, the encryption method was reverse-engineered by Andreas Naive, making emulation possible.

Specifications

    Main CPU: Hitachi HD6417099 (SH-2) at 25 MHz

    Storage:

        SCSI CD-ROM drive

        RAM (variable amount)

        Flash ROM: 8 x 16 MiB

    Sound chip:

       16-channel 8-bit sample player, stereo

        Maximum number of colors: 32768 (15 bit colour, 555 RGB)

        Palette size: 131072 pens

        Colors per tile (backgrounds / sprites): 64 (6 bits per pixel) or 256 (8 bits per pixel), selectable

        Colors per tile (text overlay): 16 (4 bits per pixel)

    Maximum number of objects: 1024, with hardware scaling

    Scroll faces: 4 regular + 1 text overlay 'score screen' layer

    Scroll features: Horizontal & vertical scrolling, linescroll, linezoom

    Framebuffer zooming

    Color blending effects

    Hardware RLE decompression of 6 bpp and 8 bpp graphics through DMA

    Resolution, pixels: 384�224 (standard mode) / 496�224 (widescreen mode)

    Known games on this hardware: 6

Capcom Play System

Some Capcom Play System 3 Game name:

1. Street Fighter III: New Generation
2. Red Earth
3. Street Fighter III: New Generation
4. Street Fighter III 2nd Impact: Giant Attack
5. JoJo's Venture
6. Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Fight for the Future
7. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure 

 In future I will post all the Game of Capcom Play System 1/2/3