A contact would be nice, maybe he still can do it.
A person in Ontario, probably sending carts to Capcom Asia for reprogramming... my spidey sense tells me it was probably Yaton.
Would LOVE to see the ability to reprogram a CPS3 cart someday like how it’s done with CPS2. My gut tells me that the early Revision 2 motherboards that had a white JST-type port populated on them (near the lower front right of the board adjacent to the white battery cover) was used to do the deed.
That doesn't sound economical or logistically feasible though to forward twice, once to Canada, and then another to Asia.
That area of Ontario has a lot of south-east asian immigrants, so it's possible that someone who was working as a Capcom technician and kept the hardware and keys, immigrated to Canada and was offering the service.
The presumption here is that the middleman (probably) kept a stock of reprogrammed boards laying around, and would send a bunch in bulk to Asia to have them reprogrammed and returned (in bulk). Shipping cost per unit would be extremely low.
This post outright says that he had the hardware to reprogram carts.
You can run any game with a cart, doesn't matter which. I ran 3S for years with an original Jojo cart. Look into CPS3 ISO Converter.
EXAMPLE 1) if we want to play JOJOBA on a JOJO cartridge, the 1st CD will have correct files 10,20,30,31,40 and
41 (meaning SIMMS 1,2,3 and 4).
From the 2nd CD only interest us the files 50 and 51 which will be located in position of 30 and 31 (SIMM 3).
To make it work, press service button, select UPDATE ALL FROM MENU, install first CD2 (will update SIMM3)
replace SIMM3 with an new one, update using CD1 and place the SIMM3 extracted in the 1st update
into position SIMM5.
Notice that in both updates we should keep something in SIMM5, for the BIOS to let us upgrade.
EXAMPLE 2) If we want to play SFIII 3rd Strike with a SFIII New Generation cartridge, 1st CD
will have correct 10,30,31,40 and 41 (meaning SIMMS 1,3 and 4).
2nd CD will contain the right 20,50,51,60 and 61 files (SIMM 2,5 and 6) but will be programmed in SIMM 1, 3 and 4 respectively.
In this case, we should first Update using CD2, extract SIMMs 1,3 and 4 and then update using CD1.
When the 2nd update process has finished, we place the SIMM 1,3 and SIMM 4 of the first update in positions SIMM2, 5 and 6.
And that's it.