Paprium: The Official Thread Mk 2

[nihilblack]

It's probably just a video file playing on the console 🙃

[Pain for Fun]

I guess we will find out more with in the next week to see if there is any truth to it or not.

[Devil N]

With the amount of copyright infringement going on, looks like Fonzie might be getting his wish and hear from Sega soon after all.

[Pain for Fun]

I just ordered another two copies of the Classic Edition of Paprium today at 5:30PM eastern time. I wonder when my first copy I ordered & payed for from 2017 will show up, along with the two I just ordered. Anyone know when the next batch is shipping out?

[axel]

Well it looks like the ROM file has gotten dumped already on January 20, 2021. I don't know how legit this claim is to be honest but if it is true, then it only took 41 days to do. Here is the link to the source I heard it from.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Billytime...59667812007936

I find that extremely unlikely. Even if you dump the ROM how does it emulate the FPGA and MCU? Unless it's running without the enhancements, then perhaps it would look like the version we saw in 2018.

Reverse engineering the extra hardware seems like a lot of work for one game. If Paprium is emulated I can see it being like MAME in the early days when WAV files were used to make up for a lack of emulation of the sound hardware. Or look at some of the older Taito games that used MCUs for specific routines, it took decades for the contents to be properly dumped via decapping the chip, in the meantime the MAME developers wrote their own code to approximate the function of the MCU.

Unless Fonzie really screwed up it should be years before Paprium is properly emulated.

[Pain for Fun]

I only found the post on Twitter from a source on YouTube, so I just figured I would post it here for others to see also. I have my doubts also that the ROM could be dumped that fast. Who is really that cleaver to do it this quickly in all honesty? No one in the gaming community is that good that I have ever heard of.

[NeoVamp]

No one in the gaming community is that good that I have ever heard of.

Dude we got like people here developing their own flashcarts, coding new games, hacking in translations or bugfixing audio drivers. there's quite some skilled people here.
to some people its a game to dump this shit, and Fonzie painted quite the target on his back with his "SOR2 KILLER" and 8 years of ignoring everybody who paid him.

[Pain for Fun]

Don't get me wrong, there certainly is some dam talented people here. But there is no one here that can get this ROM dumped & working already. That was what I was saying & that could never be done that quickly by anyone. Like plenty of people have already said, it will take years.

[axel]

Dude we got like people here developing their own flashcarts, coding new games, hacking in translations or bugfixing audio drivers. there's quite some skilled people here.
to some people its a game to dump this shit, and Fonzie painted quite the target on his back with his "SOR2 KILLER" and 8 years of ignoring everybody who paid him.

I agree there are people who can do it I would just be surprised if it happens that quickly, it is like the situation with the SVP where it took years before emulators could support it.

Unless.... what if one of the unpaid people involved with Paprium decides to start dumping info anonymously? Given the hardware woes and the way this game was developed by people across several countries I imagine WM must have their own custom emulator already.

[Stifu]

With the amount of copyright infringement going on, looks like Fonzie might be getting his wish and hear from Sega soon after all.

Haha, yeah... He even told them to "man up". Maybe they will.

[roce]

I agree there are people who can do it I would just be surprised if it happens that quickly, it is like the situation with the SVP where it took years before emulators could support it.

Unless.... what if one of the unpaid people involved with Paprium decides to start dumping info anonymously? Given the hardware woes and the way this game was developed by people across several countries I imagine WM must have their own custom emulator already.

Fonzie runs a tight ship, and is the only programmer. Unless his other personalities start leaking, you're not going to see anything.

[Devil N]

Fonzie runs a tight ship, and is the only programmer. Unless his other personalities start leaking, you're not going to see anything.

That's not entirely true. For instance the sound driver and related tools were made by Tiido and his work forms the basis of what ended up on the carts. How much of his code is actually still intact is anyone's guess, but Fonzie didn't program everything by himself.

Well it looks like the ROM file has gotten dumped already on January 20, 2021. I don't know how legit this claim is to be honest but if it is true, then it only took 41 days to do. Here is the link to the source I heard it from.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Billytime...59667812007936

This seems highly unlikely to me. My guess is that's just a video playing on the device. Heck, it may even be one of my videos. Show me a high quality video of someone actually playing the game on an emulator with their hands on the controls, and I may start to believe. Even then it's possible to fake that. Without any technical details as to how it was accomplished, or any third parties able to verify it, I'm going to file that under B for Bullshit.

Now that doesn't mean that it's impossible to dump and emulate Paprium. I think it would have been a lot harder if WaterMelon had successfully pulled off their custom DSP chip design, because then it would have been necessary to fully reverse engineer the hardware in order to emulate it. But we know now that the chips on the Paprium cart are primarily well-documented off-the-shelf chips, in particular that ARM Cortex SoC. Which means that all of the special tricks the game contains has to be "just" firmware running on the SoC. And firmware can be dumped. It's still going to take someone or some group of people with a lot of skill and patience to get it done, but it's far from impossible.

[Benkei789]

delete

[pepodmc]

Seems that paprium minigame was dumped:

https://boards.4channel.org/vr/threa...ed-and-working

https://gofile.io/d/uxmkZM


paprium problems when dumping the game:

!It's called ROM mirroring and it is caused by a protection against dump inside FPGA. Basically the FPGA acts as a firewall between access from the cartridge connector and the Flash ROM chip. It detects the access are not done by the game code running on a real console and prevent access to all area of the flash ROM.

Pier Solar first dumps were similar (with the same first block of data repeated all over the 4MB range) until some hacker figured how to trick the FPGA to get access to more data"

[axel]

Seems that paprium minigame was dumped:

https://boards.4channel.org/vr/threa...ed-and-working

https://gofile.io/d/uxmkZM


paprium problems when dumping the game:

!It's called ROM mirroring and it is caused by a protection against dump inside FPGA. Basically the FPGA acts as a firewall between access from the cartridge connector and the Flash ROM chip. It detects the access are not done by the game code running on a real console and prevent access to all area of the flash ROM.

Pier Solar first dumps were similar (with the same first block of data repeated all over the 4MB range) until some hacker figured how to trick the FPGA to get access to more data"

Yup, I looked at it in a hex editor and it seems to loop every 64k, so I guess that is the size of the mini game.
I wonder if the routine to detect if it's running on real hardware is somewhere in that?

There's a bunch of text in there too, stuff like "Hideko Sato..... Please do not dump || copy || hack this ROM" (wow good thing Fonzie put that in, I'm sure that's exactly what Sato would have done otherwise)

Plus text referring to the game as "(C) Sega 1994.APR" with the titles "Bare Knuckle 4" and "Streets of Rage 4"

Yeah... either Fonzie couldn't give up on calling it that or the carts really were manufactured before SoR4 was a thing... although SoR4 started development in 2018 so I think the former is more likely.