I have a project that I've been working on in a fair amount of secrecy. It started out as something
that piqued my interest, but I actually managed to work something out.
Now, I guess I should share that it is a program that takes CPS-2 program roms, and completely
decrypts them. More or less like phoenix roms. As you may or may not know, the phoenix games
have already caused quite a lot of problems with bootlegs, killing off 'needed' boards in order to
burn games that are more valuable or so that they can be advertised as 'never needing a battery
replacement.'
Now, the roms produced by my program do not work without some patching on real hardware. This is
not by my doing, but rather that as the battery dies, some things are changed with the board's
memory mapping. The patches are fairly easy to figure out though.
Why I think I should release this is that it may prove useful for emulating cps2 on systems with
very low amounts of ram. PSP, XBox, GP, etc, come to mind. Also, as much as I do not like
game hacks myself, I know quite a lot of people who really enjoy taking a game and modifying
the hell out of it. Having decrypted code & data in a single file would make this muuch easier.
So basically:
Cons:
Bootlegs
Killing needed (for dumping) boards
Pros:
Helping emulation for some systems
Helping game hackers
I'd really like to know people's opinions. Should I release this or not?