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MKGP2 Region changing/Card R/W

Paddy999

Paddy999

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Heya, I recently came into possession of a pair of Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 cabs - they've seen plenty of use so far, and I'd like to put some work into getting them back to top order. I read on the arcadeotaku wiki that you can change the system region by hitting service 30 times with only the security chip connected, but before playing around with that, does anybody know whether this changes the language to English in-game? I'm not sure whether this game has a separate export release or whether the English language is in the files and I didn't want to risk changing settings before asking :(

Also, both cabs seem to have card R/Ws installed, but disabled in the game test menu. I've enabled them to see what they say, but the game refuses to boot if they're not working. I've seen that these tend to be prone to causing issues and since the cards are hard to come by/made with cheap materials, I'm thinking it's probably best to leave these turned off, but what do you think? Are there any common faults that are worth checking with these card readers just in case? I didn't notice anything up with it at a glance, so I'm not quite sure where to make a start with it honestly. Thanks in advance all, I'm very happy to get these in and to see what I can do for them :D
 
There is a separate export release. I would expect that running the Japanese cart with the region set to export would boot to an error, but I don't know for certain, I have never tried it.

You should try it and report back. You can always revert back the region with the same trick.

As for the card readers, unless you have cards, what's the point of enabling the readers?

The card readers are similar to the used in Wangan, Initial D and F-Zero. There's a thread here of a Initial D card reader that didn't work at all. There's a small fuse on the board that needed to be replaced:

https://www.arcade-projects.com/threads/initial-d-1-3-card-reader-issue.29162/#post-417724

I'm not sure if there are any other repair threads on them.

Alternatively, if you don't care for physical cards, there's this:

https://www.arcade-projects.com/thr...tor-initial-d3-wmmt-mario-kart-f-zero-ax.814/
 
I'll give it a shot now and see what it says, but from the sounds of it you're probably right if there's a separate export release. The games list I saw mentioned separate exports for things like F-ZERO, but not MK, so I wasn't sure.

I did pick up a blank card incidentally, but mainly for the collectability of it and to test whether the reader would work every now and then. I would have preferred a wangan card which we also got in, but that one doesn't seem to have readers at all. That card reader emulator sounds awesome, I'll be looking into that tonight, so thank you for the heads up :)
 
F-Zero actually changes languages / locales depending on the region.

I have a Japanese twin cab setup that is set to Export and it works with a PAL GameCube GX save file. It's pretty neat.
 
Had a go at it last night but didn't get the chance to write back - I can get the serial to show up after 15 presses, but no menu after that, so there's definitely no chip installed :( if anybody knows where to grab one from for testing I'm happy to give it a shot, your mention of the F-ZERO cab changing languages is making me think it's definitely worth documenting
 
Paddy999 said:
Heya, I recently came into possession of a pair of Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 cabs - they've seen plenty of use so far, and I'd like to put some work into getting them back to top order. I read on the arcadeotaku wiki that you can change the system region by hitting service 30 times with only the security chip connected, but before playing around with that, does anybody know whether this changes the language to English in-game? I'm not sure whether this game has a separate export release or whether the English language is in the files and I didn't want to risk changing settings before asking :(

Also, both cabs seem to have card R/Ws installed, but disabled in the game test menu. I've enabled them to see what they say, but the game refuses to boot if they're not working. I've seen that these tend to be prone to causing issues and since the cards are hard to come by/made with cheap materials, I'm thinking it's probably best to leave these turned off, but what do you think? Are there any common faults that are worth checking with these card readers just in case? I didn't notice anything up with it at a glance, so I'm not quite sure where to make a start with it honestly. Thanks in advance all, I'm very happy to get these in and to see what I can do for them :D
Click to expand...

No, JP GP2 cannot be switched to English by changing region; it will not boot. And if they are NAND media boards, you are completely out of luck for English. You need media boards with the DIMMS so you can CF-boot the export version. As for cards, one nice feature about them is you can turn off the announcer in your user profile, which you can't do otherwise (this is based on information I vaguely remember reading about; no first hand experience)
 
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