Been working on tons of stuff in the background but finally some big news. I spent some time going through all the public dumps and info and was able to get the game running decrypted and dongle-free off an SD to IDE adapter on the N2. The gist of the process is:
- Flash the two bios chips with the patched ones which allow you to load non-AES encrypted containers (U15_DEC.bin and U16_DEC.bin from the public dumps)
- Image a new drive with the raw 3DX+ image and replace ALL of the files in the ext3 partition with their decrypted counterparts (also public)
- Modify the /sbin/init script in aeinitrd.img to bypass the aemount failure case
- Unsquash /boot/exec/boot and modify the script '.profile' to bypass the initial dongle check entirely and not load aksusbd (safenet daemon). Needs to be repacked with squashfs-tools 2.1 which is ancient
- Unsquash the game container and replace the 'main' executable with a version that patches out the dongle check. Also needs to be repacked with squashfs-tools 2.1.
Still have a number of things to do before public release but it does work and eliminates the need for married hard drives. Right now I have about a month before these go to their first show and there's still a bunch that needs to be done. This is the first time all cabinets have been on at the same time, and the first time a 4-way game has worked.
We had an issue with the clock settings not propagating correctly, which gave issues with data merging. The way we were able to get it to work was to disconnect all cabs from the LAN hub, set all the clocks, let the game complete a full attract cycle (cabinet sync jobs happen during the title screen). Then reconnect all cabinets to LAN, go back into test menu and exit so all cabinets find each other again. It will give you the message to reboot the system, just let a full attract cycle happen, then power off all machines and power them back on at the same time.
ALL artwork is now scanned and cleaned up or remade as a vector. A local print shop is handling the marquees and seat backs. Once those are printed, I will release the full set of cabinet artwork for anyone to use for any purpose.
In preparation for the new seat artwork, I removed all the seat backs, then wet sanded and polished them. Lots of paint overspray all over from China, so it's a big improvement.
More very soon!