CP System III


The CP System III or CPS-3 is an arcade system board that was first used by Capcom in 1996 with the arcade game Red Earth. It was the second successor to the CP System arcade hardware, following the CP System II. It would be the last proprietary system board Capcom would produce before moving on to the Dreamcast-based Naomi platform.

History

The CP System III became the final arcade system board to be designed by Capcom. It features a security mechanism; games are supplied on a CD, which contains the encrypted game contents, and a security cartridge containing the game BIOS and the SH-2 CPU with integrated decryption logic, with the per-game key stored in battery-backed SRAM. Capcom chose the CD medium in order to keep down the price of the system. When the CP System III board is first powered on, the contents of the CD are loaded into a bank of SIMMs on the motherboard, where it is executed. The program code is then decrypted at run time via the security cartridge. The security cartridge is sensitive to any sort of tampering, which will result in the decryption key being erased and the cartridge being rendered useless. Games become unplayable when the battery inside the security cartridge dies. The lone exception is , which uses a default set of decryption keys that are written to dead cartridges on boot.
In June 2007, the encryption method was reverse-engineered by Andreas Naive, making emulation possible.

Specifications

All six games are developed by Capcom and are all head-to-head fighting games in a list of games that appears to be as small as the CP System Dash library.
English titleRelease dateJapanese title
Red Earth1996-11-21War-Zard
Street Fighter III: New Generation1997-02-04Street Fighter III
'1997-09-30Street Fighter III 2nd Impact
JoJo's Venture1998-12-02JoJo no Kimyō na Bōken
'1999-05-12Street Fighter III 3rd Strike
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future1999-09-13JoJo no Kimyō na Bōken Mirai e no Isan