Offtopic: Capcom and Gaelco's past douchebaggery || Original: Re: Capcom on PC game mods

Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Fri, 19 Jan 2024 09:23:23 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

 > He started business in an era when hackers would

literally take out the boards from arcade machines, apply a new ROM, and then resell it as a completely new machine. There was reason for Capcom's paranoia and hatred of modding. Is it any wonder the
company is still obsessed with the same ideals it had 40 years ago?
 

The Street Fighter 2 hacked bootlegs were making the game better by
adding extras stuff (and syphoning money from the legit but stale
Vanilla Street Fighter II) to the point they had to add many of those
ideas (high speed, flying hadokens) on the updates.
But anyways, I just found something pretty funy, just yesterday.
Capcom was selling the CPS and CPS2 (Shadow over mystaria) systems back
then. Modular systems to fight back against the neogeo. You sell the
base board, then sell cheaper game cartridges, vendor lock-in. This is
just backstory.
Ok, CPS1 had a bootleg problem, as the Street Fighter II clones are
proof of it,You only needed to bootleg one cart and the base board
would still be the same. With CPS2 They added one of the worst
encryptions ever, the "suicide battery". A non replaceable battery that
kept the decryption algorythm in RAM. This was not a problem since an
arcade could send the game back and get one with a newer battery, but a
nightmare for collectors until someone was able to resurrect CPS2 boards.
But I managed to find somebody worse than Capcom: Gaelco. This spanish
arcade company managed to be Worst than Bobby Kotick (Worse than Hitler
is overused).
Originally they made money by developing their own bootleg system with
modular daughterboards. Like CPS and Neogeo, but looking like something
straight out of a mad max movie. Bad Dudes / Dragon Ninja was not
released in Europe and the only way to play it without importing the
full 110V board was these bootlegs.
By the time they started developing their own games (which were still
ripoffs of existing games), they added an antitampering protection that
makes Capcom look consumer friendly: If it detected the memory was being
read, the game would self destruct and be lost forever.