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lukemorse1

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curious if anyone has worked with a wargods pcb and has been able to create a working compact flash drive and boot rom to work with the board.

Ive heard that the system is similar to KI 2 in that it needs a decrypted boot rom to work but cant confirm it. Looking to purchase a working CF set for my own pcb.
 
Not that i know of on a Namco 246/256 ... But it would be cool if we could make other stuff work.
 
@Darksoft

Can you please download the Wargods boot rom and remove the disk ID check?


I also know for a fact there are two HDD versions. One will only boot in 15k (or med-res, can't remember) The other will boot in either. The one I own does both.
 
@Darksoft

Can you please download the Wargods boot rom and remove the disk ID check?


I also know for a fact there are two HDD versions. One will only boot in 15k (or med-res, can't remember) The other will boot in either. The one I own does both.
wow Mitsurugi,

You actually have a working dual boot rom that is awesome. Have you attempted a CF image or is it only seagate hdd?

If there is/would be a way to fix wargods ti run on cf it would preserve these boards and keep them from getting tossed. Ive got 2 myself :)
 
it's a standard boot rom but only works with the Seagate drive. I could have sworn that back in the day this was hacked but it wasn't a very popular game at all so maybe didn't get the treatment like I thought.
 
sounds like a challenge.
too bad i dont have a compatable pcb.

maybe i will look after i get around to hacking the bootroms of area51/maximumfoce
also, i want to get the ki2 conversion working in the driver so i can decrypt the harddrive.
 
sounds like a challenge.
too bad i dont have a compatable pcb.

maybe i will look after i get around to hacking the bootroms of area51/maximumfoce
also, i want to get the ki2 conversion working in the driver so i can decrypt the harddrive.
i burned new bootroms for my a51 to make it a a51/mf combo board so i thought this was hacked.
 
There are two different board types. Dual layer and single pcb.
 
there are more than 2, and they dont all use the same cpu.

i have a couple of 1st-gen area51 boards,
i want to put the maxforce upgrade on them.

i didnt try yet, but in the mame source they patch some protection.
so i assumed the official upgrade came with a pal or something.
 
so i took a look,
it's not checking the make or size of the drive, only part of the serial number.

now here is a problem.
i need to make it fail, but i just cant see where mame is providing the serial from.
i'm sure it's not in the chd, but i dont see it in the driver!
 
It's in the extended CHD info i guess. So not the data itself, but in the data added when the disk was dumped by MAME.
When Wargods queries the drive, that data is fed back.

I guess the easiest way at this point is write the CHD to a different disk, then re-image it?

Also other tricks to make it fail, read some data from ROM which you know is wrong, instead of data from the disk :)
ROM Area holds most required items.
 
not so fast, mame identifies the serial number as 00000000000000000000
lol
 
Modify the address :)

From the other topic, the leading zeroes are the key here. Usually you can edit the data as it is read into ram. Pseudo-code since i didn't look at it:

load data into d0
put d0 at A5+1000 (0x501000)
debugger to set breakpoint here
Select this region in mame/maincpu (one of these is editable by hand.
edit the zeroes to 01020304050 whatever :)
g
watch it fail.

Do you have the addy where it does the read/check?
 
Id be up for experimenting on my board here for anyone able to make a CF drive and boot rom for Wargods. Unfortunately my laptop cant do it.

Id like to find out how to get it going and what works and doesnt. I will pay to get a working board.
 
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check is in the 3100 area,
i had a breakpoint at 3114 that i think was just before the drive stuff.
 
I spent like an hour with the search function on github to find anything with ata/ide/hdd/serial, but the content of this cpp doesn't seem to come up for me :/ (it does when you search directly for the filename).
 
well, i changed the serial and it still works.
so maybe the bootrom in mame is not protected!
 

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