> lol... You spent weeks asking about becomeing a member and then when you were
> you disapeered and did nothing and only surfaced again once the protection was
> broke. You did not provide anything that wasent already known either, in fact I
> dont think you provided anything apart from show you had some basic knowledge.

Yes, I had independently acquired about as much understanding as the rest about CPS2, as much as could have been figured out from looking at the ROMs, and knowing basic 68K, without having any actual hardware to play with.

And no, I didn't spend "weeks asking", I asked you on IRC and presented what I knew, and that I shared an interest in cracking CPS2 and was shortly after accepted, but then removed a week or so later, roughly around the time of your public about-face. I don't remember if I was removed or I asked to be removed, I don't really care either way.

My only interest was in the technical side, understanding and cracking the encryption. Not finding a workaround that simply allowed one to play the games. So there was no problem with me with parting from CPS2SHOCK, since it became clear that their direction was not aligned in the same direction as my personal interest in the matter.

> In fact there was noone on the original CPS2 shock team that did or provide
> anything which helped my attack apart from CrashTest who helped with PC side
> software. If you remember right they all wanted a hardware attack approach while
> I was the only one who wanted a software based attack.

I mean, there really were only 3 or 4 technical people anyways, expecting a "major breakthrough" from any of them within a week's time is a bit extreme, don't you think?

I'll admit, I think your concept of trojaning the hardware was a stroke of genius, of sorts, but the lack of any sort of moral responsibility towards actual preservation of these CPS2 games that you profess to love so much, and your conduct in that manner, is what most people dislike about you Raz.

I just wanted to find out more information about the system, period, and help in any way that I could. I was working strictly from the ROMs angle. You're wrong about you being the only one interested in a software-based approach - I thought that it was possibly crackable purely from brute-forcing the ROMs themselves. As a matter of fact, I was SO sure about that, I started organizing a project to do just that, before I was ever associated with CPS2SHOCK. cps2@hotmail.com, that used to be me. (Have since long lost the password though.)

Yes, FYI everybody, I was "The Director", in case anyone did't remember that chunk of emu-history. Sadly, while optimizing the assembly-code that I was going to use as the core of the code-cracker, I realized that the algo that I had imagined would help to brute-force it, factored down essentially to "1=1". Oops. So, that didn't succeed, but I did give it quite an honest bit of effort trying to organize it all. Chemical was in on it too, more like I dragged that person in on it...

I apologize if you think or thought that I wanted to take credit somehow, the truth is that I don't, I just want to know if my theories about the encryption are right or not.

Dumping those data-tables, would have allowed me to prove that one way or another. Who knows, maybe "CPS2SHOCK" could have broken the real algorithm, so long ago, and these games could have been preserved by now already. But when it stopped being interesting in those goals, and instead only "send paypal", well, that was it.

Granted, what Charles has discovered about the Sega System16 encryption stuff does seem to cast some doubt on my prior theories. I had felt that what Sega is actually doing, was too complex, and that no-one would ever try that. I guess it is doable though, if you can actually slightly modify the processor code. (Speaking of CBC-mode encryption in the presence of async interrupts here.)

So, in the end, I guess neither one of us, has come any closer to understanding the true nature of the encryption, unless there are things that you're not telling us thus far.