I recently built a supergun with battery-free 3s for igloobob, and halfway through he asked me to write up a guide of everything I did. I wrote it all from memory, so if anyone sees that I’m missing something, or if something doesn’t make sense, let me know. Also, it’s a little long so I’ll just post a link to a pdf of the guide.
Edit: I should also mention, Mitsurugi-w, has a topic on the neo-geo forums offering two services. The first one is converting any cps3 cart to work with darksoft’s superbios (64darksoft.blogspot.com/2013/08/one-bios-to-rule-them-all-and-one-cdto.html). This process should also de-suicide a dead cart. The second service is replacing capcom’s custom sh2 processor with a standard processor. This allows you to play unencrypted cps3 games, which means that “the games will run 100% as Capcom intended.” Here’s the link to Mitsurugi’s topic (you need to be logged in to view it):
so not only can you play battery free 3s, you can convert 2nd impact to 3rd without ever owning 3rd strike! Wow
I remember hearing that someone was reviving dead 3s carts with ONLY the asia version. with your method can you revive or replace 2nd impact with non-Asia versions of 3rd strike?
well, it’s not my method. this guy named darksoft made a tool that lets you convert 2nd impact to any cps3 game, and it lets you specify the region.
there used to be some bugs in converting 2nd impact that caused 3s to freeze, but with the final version of the tool, every bug has been resolved (had something to do with finding every line of code in the game)
Yeah it took a while to figure out, but we converted second impact kit to US 3rd Strike 990512.
I think you could build everything for pretty cheap if you can get the 2I kit + 1 extra SIMM for cheap locally. A lot of our expense came from buying 2 2I kits through coinopexpress and paying pretty hefty shipping on top of that.
Allows you to convert a 2I CPS3 kit to a 3S of any revision or country code. This is important since real 3S kits have the suicide battery copy protection working correctly, so if you own one eventually you’ll have to resolder a new battery or send it to Japan to get fixed (if you know anyone there to send it to). with 2I, the copy protection wasn’t implemented correctly so you don’t actually need a battery at all. so as a result you have arcade perfect 3S that will last as long as the hardware itself doesn’t die. there’s no battery to die and wipe out the CD key on the cartridge.
We chose 2I because there’s no battery issue to worry about, and also because 2I kits are usually pretty inexpensive compared to 3rd Strike kits. It’s the best of both worlds.
I’m sure most of you already know this but I’ll mention it here for people who happen upon this thread later - IMO CPS3 is the best version of 3rd Strike. Dreamcast, Xbox, PS2, Online Edition, FBA and GGPO, MAME, these are all less ideal versions of the game because they’re the wrong speed or have extra input lag. 3rd Strike is great no matter what and everyone should play it however they can. However if you love the game and are willing to invest the time, I think building a CPS3 setup is definitely the way to go.
We just bought two 2i kits and took one of the simms from the 2nd kit. You might also be able to find someone on the srk trading post or the neo-geo forums who’d be willing to sell one to you.
I’m pretty sure that the simms were designed by capcom, which means only cps3 simms will work.
For anyone interested in obtaining an extra simm, it looks like Darksoft if planning to make some simms for “cps2 and/or cps3” (http://64darksoft.blogspot.com/2013/09/cps2-and-cps3-simms-batch.html). He’s got a poll going on right now in his blog to see how interested people are in this.
