What's new

2x6's DVD or HDD clone to SSD/CF-IDE

msamiullah said:
Is this version of SC2 dumped?
1747012963935.jpeg
1747012976624.jpeg
Click to expand...



I saw that on eBay for $399 and I noticed it was missing its dongle I can't believe someone actually paid that for one that was missing its dongle


Nevermind, you were the one listing that
 
yeah its been taken off till I find out if its requiers dumping or someone on this forum needs it for reverse engineering!
 
msamiullah said:
yeah its been taken off till I find out if its requiers dumping or someone on this forum needs it for reverse engineering!
Click to expand...
I'm currently in the process of reverse engineering it.

Untill I get the JVS to USB to finalyl run the game, I'm coping with labeling the DONGLEMAN driver on ghidra.
I even made a thread here asking for dumps with the ps3 adapter (if u have one)
 
El_isra

Thread '[REQUEST]: SoulCalibur2 Conquest card dumps request!'

Hello everyone. as some of you may know. I've began analyzing the SoulCalibur 2 conquest cards with the intention of replicating them as well as fixing damaged ones (and maybe other things in the future)

For investigation purposes. I need as much dumps as possible. so if you own both a conquest card and a PS3 mc adapter (Sorry! current lack of information at the moment keeps me scared enough to not even try making a dumper that works from a console. so for now, let's keep it at ps3 adapter dumps)


Another detail, I'm not only after the dump, but also from some data of the card...

The...
  • Like
  • Love

I would suspect that multiple dumps would benefit the RE effort.
 
twistedsymphony said:
El_isra

Thread '[REQUEST]: SoulCalibur2 Conquest card dumps request!'

Hello everyone. as some of you may know. I've began analyzing the SoulCalibur 2 conquest cards with the intention of replicating them as well as fixing damaged ones (and maybe other things in the future)

For investigation purposes. I need as much dumps as possible. so if you own both a conquest card and a PS3 mc adapter (Sorry! current lack of information at the moment keeps me scared enough to not even try making a dumper that works from a console. so for now, let's keep it at ps3 adapter dumps)


Another detail, I'm not only after the dump, but also from some data of the card...

The...
  • Like
  • Love

I would suspect that multiple dumps would benefit the RE effort.
Click to expand...
In fact it wouldn't because each card dump is encrypted with per card keys. It will be useful after encryption is defeated so keep it safe for now. It's exactly because the encryption key is unique per card we don't know how to decrypt it and copying data from one card to another does not work.
 
l_oliveira said:
In fact it wouldn't because each card dump is encrypted with per card keys. It will be useful after encryption is defeated so keep it safe for now. It's exactly because the encryption key is unique per card we don't know how to decrypt it and copying data from one card to another does not work.
Click to expand...
so what information from the card do we need to help defeat encryption?
 
Last edited:
twistedsymphony said:
so what information from the card do we need to help defeat encryption?
Click to expand...
For now, not much.

But I've made a modified SC2 dongle that will monitor all the commands sent to the conquest card and log them into the arcade UART. when I finally get the game running, I can start investigating even further
 
@El_isra, do you know why Fate/unlimited Codes can be run from a CF card, but most other games can not?
 
nem said:
@El_isra, do you know why Fate/unlimited Codes can be run from a CF card, but most other games can not?
Click to expand...
I haven't delved too much into the games behavior when reading game data, some games expect specific responses from specific commands, maybe that's it...

When we start messing around with drivers to re-route reads to SD2PSX/psxmemcard we will peek at that
 
  • Like
Reactions: nem
What I suspect is the drivers don't clamp the highest DMA modes supported. (haven't checked in detail at this time) You could attempt to swap the ACATA/ACATAHD modules around the dongles and see what happens.
 
twistedsymphony said:
My script finally finished crunching through all of the HDD images so here is the byte position of the last non 0x00 or 0xFF byte for each HDD game:
2x6_hdd_sizes.png


the recommended drive size in the last column is just me picking the next largest standard drive size above the last used byte position.

you can check the work by opening the .img file in the HxD application and then going to the byte offset specified.
Click to expand...
How do I determine the hexadecimal cut address of an hdd.img file?
image.webp
 
Last edited:
I scanned another hard drive, but it only showed up to the end of the drive.
QQ20260511-164906.png

twistedsymphony said:
so far this script is working well. and I'm glad I'm taking this approach.

For instance Zoids Infinity NM00016 M9006212A, Ver.2.06J (HDD).img
size on disc reports as 288 MB and looking in HxD around that point it appears the rest of the drive is 0x00

however using this script it found that there's actually data hiding around 986.93 MB so while at first glance it might seem a 512MB drive would work, you really need 1GB plus.

it's very slow, but there's only 15 HDD games and we only need to do this one time, so I'll let this run in the background and report back once I have all of the sizes for the games.

so far I've also found that Battle Gear 3 and Battle Gear 3 tuned cannot be shrunk as they have data all the way at the end of the drive image, but at least they're 20GB and 30GB drives rather than 80GB like some other games.

also updated the script to include a status % so you know it's working and how far along it is:
Code: 
import os
import sys

def find_last_useful_byte(file_path, block_size=64 * 1024 * 1024):  # 64MB
    try:
        file_size = os.path.getsize(file_path)
    except OSError as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}")
        return 0

    with open(file_path, "rb") as f:
        offset = file_size
        total_blocks = (file_size + block_size - 1) // block_size
        block_num = 0

        while offset > 0:
            block_num += 1
            read_size = min(block_size, offset)
            offset -= read_size
            f.seek(offset)
            block = f.read(read_size)

            for i in reversed(range(len(block))):
                byte = block[i]
                if byte != 0x00 and byte != 0xFF:
                    last_useful_offset = offset + i + 1
                    print(f"\nLast useful byte offset:")
                    print(f"  Decimal : {last_useful_offset}")
                    print(f"  Hex     : 0x{last_useful_offset:X}")
                    print(f"Size of useful data: {last_useful_offset / (1024*1024):.2f} MB")
                    return last_useful_offset

            # Progress indicator
            percent_complete = 100.0 * (block_num / total_blocks)
            print(f"\rScanning: {percent_complete:.1f}% complete", end="", flush=True)

    print("\nNo useful data found (file is all 0x00 or 0xFF)")
    return 0

if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        print("Usage: python find_last_useful_byte.py <filename>")
        sys.exit(1)

    filename = sys.argv[1]
    find_last_useful_byte(filename)
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Reused HDDs sometimes have unnecessary data stored in the latter half of their storage space; this is a common issue with Taito drives.
 
I mean if there is data at the end of the drive then that's what the script will tell you. But yeah it looks like that drive has data related to Microsoft Outlook so probably junk data from being reused from somewhere else.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top