Hey guys
This is purely curiosity, so don’t go flaming like “blah blah why would you want to downgrade ST when you can just buy a Super board”.
I’ve been wondering something…
I know that for emulated ST to work you need two roms, SSF2.zip and SSF2T.zip. It seems that SSF2T is more or less a patch for SSF2 - kind of like how you could upgrade SF4 by DLC
I also know that when I changed the battery in my ST board, it had 2 PCBs in it (one stacked on top of the other) which my other boards do not have. So I got thinking, I wonder if the bottom board contains the SSF2 code, and the top board contains the SSF2T code (which I’m sure they do if memory serves me right, briefly looking at the code on the ROM chips), so the board itself was kind of patched with this update PCB.
So you know where I’m going to go next - if you disconnect/remove the top PCB, would your ST board revert back to being a Super board?
Has anyone tested it, or is anyone brave enough to test it? My board is not phoenixed, so I don’t want to go disconnecting PCBs in case the decryption key gets lost, but if you have a phoenixed board and are brave, fancy trying this out?
My intuition is that this is absolutely not the case and I’m 99% sure. I know a lot more about other architectures than CPS2, but for example, removing the C board (the CPS1 version of the board you’re talking about) means that you get no graphics. I’ve always wondered why some games like Super Turbo have a dependency in MAME, I have a feeling this is more related to emulation concerns than any relationship between the boards in the real world.
Ah, I kind of just assumed that SSF2 and SSF2T shared a common ROM set (eg the bottom board) and that the files in SSF2T.zip are the ROMs from the top board. Even if it doesn’t work out exactly, perhaps you could use some of the chips on the SSF2 board to repair SSF2T boards
Don’t quote me on this but I think ST uses many of the files/much of the data from super. But not all the data,and thus not all the data is on the board. The vast majority of it is but not enough to boot up super on its own. But that’s just my gut feeling from dealing with emulators. I don’t actually have any facts or evidence to back it up. But its a really strong gut feeling so I thought it night provide insight on how to test. Eg remove some files from super ROM, force a boot and note changes, if any.
(To see how much of st is shared with super)
I have to replace suicide batteries on both my ST boards soon and IIRC the ROM chips are labeled on my boards maybe there is a correlation between the labels and filenames we can compare before dismantling an ST board
I like how ssf2t.zip is a “patch” to ssf2.zip, both games use the same sprites for basically every move, with a few frame differences, so probably the same thing applies to the actual board
no. ST actually has a second board that other CPS2 games don’t have. The common belief is that both Super Turbo and Super SF2 data is intact in it’s entirety.
HF doesn’t have CE data in it’s entirety. Also, when emulated HF doesn’t require CE. Super turbo requires Super when emulated.
I remember reading in an interview that ST boards were actually made from leftover SSF2 boards that Capcom had lying around. So that might explain why it was that weird second board that none of the other games have
Some data was rewritten so not all of the data is there . SSF2 isn’t needed in the newer dumps of ST, Final Burn for GGPO is just really old. Some old dumps of Zero 2 Alpha use to require Alpha 2 roms does that mean all of Zero 2 alpha includes A2? No, it just saved memory on old computers.
@jedpossum i know. That’s why my first post in this tread was about determining how much ssf2 was intact in super turbo. I did not realize newer dumps did this already
