Question about X3 game drives and dongles.

[Kujako]

So I have a pile of drives and dongles from X3 systems. However the drives seem to be blank. Is this normal, or were they wiped at some point? Any chance of recovering them or finding drive images I could use to restore them with? Would hate to have this stuff just be paper weights.

 

[DurbanXe]

I read here and there that the games were proprietary to its original machine and therefore not intergeable.
I tried swapping 2 games and it didn't work.
So yes it will become paperweights.
WDs are easily erasable.
I leave the floor to the experts to confirm.

 

[Kujako]

I'm definitely no expert on this subject but i did a little testing a while back.


I was under the impression that every motherboad/hdd/dongle had a unique key pairing and basically if you lose 1 piece from either of that then it's dead. Changing HDD/dongle/motherboad from anything but it's original unit from the factory meant it was basically dead (from an original game perspective)

But from my testing that wasn't the case.

I tested a bunch of LOV 4 units and the pairing is motherboard/dongle/hdd/DMAC card. Yes, the dmac cards are also part of the security chain. BUT... you can swap HDD and dongles for the same game between units and they still boot. Now I only did this for LOV as that was all i had multiples of at the same time, but this breaks what I initially thought was the case security wise.

It seems the security was created at the game level, not the unit level. So it's not unique individual keys for everything per unit, it's just per game. I can't confirm for other games, but for LOV it certainly seemed that way. I can confirm that you can't rip a DMAC card out of a Gunslinger and put it in a LOV4 and make it work to boot the original game. There's something in the DMAC card that links it to that game. This includes the ATA HDD lock keys, they have to be the same across the game, otherwise i wouldn't have been able to boot the game across 3 LOV motherboards using the same HDD, it shouldn't have worked if the ATA keys were different.

Can't confirm if this is the same for other games, but it defintiely was for LOV4. But the thing is... most of the games require custom controllers and nesica network access to use, and everything is dumped and stuff is patched out to work on a pc for the most part. So... they are sort of, kind of useless, except for getting a game running, that you can't play without nesica (which doesn't exist anymore) or custom controls anyways.

If you boot your pc with one of those drives connected, your bios should ask you for a password before it will boot. If it doesn't then they're ATA unlocked. If they don't require a password, and they are blank they they are wiped most likely. You won't be able to read any data from them without unlocking them. No idea how to unlock Toshiba drives. WD ones you can find the info easy on google. From my perspective, they are basically useless, except as replacements for pretty unpopular arcade machines that have requirements that you can't meet as the servers were shut down for all the games long ago anyways.

LOV4 requires a special asic (i think) based controller for reading cards as it's a card game, and Gunslinger is an online multiplayer game. I have 1 or 2 for collectible purposes, because they look cool, otherwise i just bin the drives and the dongles!

My 2c.

I tried booting with one of the drives that should be the same game as my X3 was pre-multi and it says there’s no boot device. Inspecting the drives on a desktop I see no partition table. So I’m suspecting they were erased unfortunately.

 

[Kujako]

I read in the earlier days it was thought that the security was fragile and basically if you lost your cmos battery, you'd lose your per game per device key. This is also not in my testing. I've nuked the bios, left the battery out for a month, desoldered and resoldered different bios chips across different games, and i can still make the default games boot.

It's all built into the optimized bios default settings. Just go to your bios, and set LOAD OPTIMIZED DEFAULTS, and it re-enables all the security with the keys etc it needs. Try that first, load optimized defaults.

If you just connect the drive when HDD security is disabled, as it needs to be for your multi, it definitely won't work.

Thanks. Will give this all a try when I get a chance (would do so today, but Elden Ring).

 

[skate323k137]

I tried booting with one of the drives that should be the same game as my X3 was pre-multi and it says there’s no boot device. Inspecting the drives on a desktop I see no partition table. So I’m suspecting they were erased unfortunately.

ATA locked drives will appear to have no partition table. If you're in Linux try fdisk -l /dev/sdb (assuming it's sdb) and if you get input output error the drive is locked.

It is probably pointless but if you did need to dump these for preservation, there are a couple possible methods. The way I had done before was sending the hdd and key off to someone with a sata analyzer and could MITM the key exchange.