PS2 Namco System 246 & 256 MC dongles and HDD

Berion

Berion

Developer
1. Anyone with those arcade have dumped their dongles? Since they based on MagicGate, they need MCFS and probably signing behaviour is the same as retail PS2 models. I'm curious the contents, structure and XLFs header type.

I'll be glad if someone could do:
  • on hacked PS2, run Memory Card Annihilator
  • now (not earlier to avoid any writes to MC by OSDSYS) insert dongle into MC slot and try make image of it (put USB pendrive with FAT32 on MBR and choose from menu "Create MC image" option)
  • also "Memory Card Info" informations would be nice to know
If signing method can be revealed we could stop afraid of dongle cards death and use any standard memory card (high probably ;)).

Or maybe they have totally different firmware and/or some exotic hardware that will not be read by PS2? I dunno. And/or maybe they even are not Memory Cards but just put into theirs enclosure and communicate in the same way as normal MCs (something like MX4SIO/SIO2SD)? Also I don't know.
No known algorithm or security code for accessing the contents of the COH dongle through the memory card interface is known to exist at present, and a retail PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 3 (with memory card adapter) cannot access the card. There is no capability to access the data on the card from a retail PlayStation 2, and conversely, there is also no capability to accidentally (or intentionally) erase or reformat the card as the security mechanisms embedded in the COH dongle magic gate chip are not openable by any retail hardware.
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COH-H10020 dongle.jpg


2. Anyone with HDD could share somehow image of it? Based on this wiki:
https://wiki.arcadeotaku.com/w/Namco_System_246/256#Hard_Drive
Some games utilize a 3.5" hard drive in place of an optical drive to speed up access to data that is too large to be cached in the 32MB buffer RAM. The format of the drive and its data is completely up to the discretion of the game developer, and examples have been seen in both raw and Sony APA partition schemes. As is the case with the optical drive, the data on the drive cannot be accessed unless the game executable contains the libraries necessary for accessing the data and the partition types used, so a hard drive cannot be used as a replacement for an DVD-ROM game or vice versa at the discretion of the user. (...)
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I wondering what APA types contains, what partitioning scheme they following and if there are PFS partitions, what contains.
 
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Berion said:
I'll be glad if someone could do:
  • on hacked PS2, run Memory Card Annihilator
  • now (not earlier to avoid any writes to MC by OSDSYS) insert dongle into MC slot and try make image of it (put USB pendrive with FAT32 on MBR and choose from menu "Create MC image" option)
  • also "Memory Card Info" informations would be nice to know
Click to expand...
Berion said:
If signing method can be revealed we could stop afraid of dongle cards death and use any standard memory card (high probably ;)).
Click to expand...
Dongles are authenticated with arcade keys and arcade SECRMAN.
MagicGate executables are signed with arcade keys, their structure is basically the same as PS2 KELFs.
Slot 1 of the sys2x6 auths dongles with arcade keys, slot 2 auths cards with retail keys.

Berion said:
I wondering what APA types contains, what partitioning scheme they following and if there are PFS partitions, what contains.
Click to expand...
Standard APA+PFS or custom FS depending on the titles.
 
Assembler is dead, Obscure restricting downloads and I'm not familiar with any warez sites/torrents. So for me they are quite invisible. ^^

@krHACKen Thanks for the info!
 
i tried recompiling it and cant find the ghsi prebuilt sdk that me and lazybastard were working on at psx-scene back in the day, it was l_olivera that had it or defor one of the two but i have so many things ps2 backed up i seem to have misplaced it in my collection and need it to backup 2 of my dongles that i bought from playstationmuseum
 
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i have compiled it , but even replacing the 32 bits in the boot file and copying it back it wont boot. can someone help
 
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i used the wrong keyset in the arcade section, then you need to use outdated sdk's or update the src to cleanly compile
 
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Thanks for the explanation.

BTW: If You want better view of image contents, You can use IsoBuster (many dongles have also deleted files, in some cases they wasn't overwritten and can be easily retrieved in IB if You are interested).

For images with ECC use *.vm2 extension (or else IsoBuster display them malformed).
For images without ECC use *.bin extension.
 
Don't use the first set of keys in the arcade keys use second set. and the above src code is old (so you have to update the code to compile on new sdks or get a old one from around the time the software was made) so many others have customized the code to fit them selves and hardly shared them. i have collected 5 versions of this software with cool features in each but wish they were 1 app.
 
Berion said:
Thanks for the explanation.

BTW: If You want better view of image contents, You can use IsoBuster (many dongles have also deleted files, in some cases they wasn't overwritten and can be easily retrieved in IB if You are interested).

For images with ECC use *.vm2 extension (or else IsoBuster display them malformed).
For images without ECC use *.bin extension.
Click to expand...


For images with ECC use *.vm2 or ".ps2" extension (or else IsoBuster display them malformed).
 
extraweb1 said:
Don't use the first set of keys in the arcade keys use second set. and the above src code is old (so you have to update the code to compile on new sdks or get a old one from around the time the software was made) so many others have customized the code to fit them selves and hardly shared them. i have collected 5 versions of this software with cool features in each but wish they were 1 app.
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if you have newer/updated source code of ps3mca tool then upload it and share the link. Another developer might show up in the future and "mix" those 5 versions in one single full version.
 
@extraweb1 What those special features are?

@TnA Also PS3MCA-Tool was originally DMCA down so it is not really a safe code to publish until mechacon emulation removing which would makes this app almost useless.
 
TnA said:
No please DON'T, because it is from a closed section!

DM it to @bucanero or he can have it via the PS2-Scene-Discord!
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I won't share publicly. I respect you. I know what problems it could cause. So many scenes gone over the years cause of different things I don't want this to be one of them
 
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