Capcom Play System 1

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Capcom Play System 1

Image:SystemPicture.jpg
Manufacturer: Capcom
Alternate Names: CPS1
Announced:
Release date: JP: ?/?/88
NA: ?/?/88
EU: ?/?/88
AU: ?/?/88
Initial Price: JP: -
NA: -
EU: -
AU: -
Discontinued: ?/?/95


Contents

Description of Hardware

The Capcom CPS1 arcade board was introduced into arcades in 1988 with the game Forgotten Worlds and played host to many of Capcoms most fondly remembered games including Ghouls and Ghosts, Strider and the legendary Street Fighter 2. It was superceded in 1993 by the CPS2 although games using the board were still developed until 1995's Megaman: The Power Battles.

Hardware Specifications

  • Main CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 10.0 MHz
  • Sound CPU: ZiLOG Z80 @ 4 MHz
  • Sound Chips: Yamaha YM2151 @ 3.57958 MHz + OKI MSM6295 @ 7.576 kHz or Q-Sound @ 4 MHz
  • Graphics Chips: ?
  • Color Palette: ?
  • Total On Screen Colors: 4096
  • Colors per Tile: ?
  • Object Number : ?
  • Scroll Faces : ?
  • Resolution : 384×224

One feature of the CPS1 board that is important to note for collectors is the presence of "suicide batteries" - previously many arcade game manufacturers including Capcom had used encrypted ROM chips in their arcade boards in an effort to prevent bootlegging. The decryption tables for the ROMs were held in a RAM chip powered by a battery - when the battery ran down the decryption tables were no longer accurate and board would cease to function. It is possible to get around this security measure if the encryption on the ROM chips is cracked and new decrypted ROM chips burnt and installed on the board.

Capcom employed a variation of this concept with the CPS1 board by powering a custom video chip with a suicide battery - when the battery died the in game graphics would not display correctly.

Hardware Revisions

QSound

In 1992 Capcom developed an enhanced version of the CPS1 with expanded sound capabilities. The enchanced board supported a system for positional 3D audio from a stereo source developed in the 80s by Qsound Labs Ltd. Qsound technology later found it's way into the CPS2 and CPS3 boards as well as various Sega hardware including the Saturn and the Dreamcast.

This version of the board also included a second suicide battery.

CPS Changer

There was a home model of the CPS1 board called the CPS Changer which was similar to SNKs Neo Geo AES. Only a handful of CPS1 games were released for the CPS Changer including a cut down version of the CPS2 game Street Fighter Alpha.

Games

Peripherals

The Forgotten Worlds cabinet featured a Pong style rotating paddle which could be rotated to change the players angle of fire. The paddle was pressed down to fire.

Emulation

Although all the CPS1 games are fully playable in MAME there are several excellent emulators that will run them on slower machines:

Callus - discontinued

The first working CPS1 emulator. Although work stopped on it a long time ago it is still of interest as it will run games in a playable state on very low spec systems (30-40fps on a P100 16mb RAM).

An unofficial Windows GUI version of Callus was released shortly after the final official version which included support for the CPS1 changer version of Street Fighter Alpha. There is a homepage for this version here but it's unclear whether work is still being done on it: http://cps2shock.retrogames.com/cls95p/

WinKawaks - http://cps2shock.retrogames.com/download.html

An excellent emulator for CPS1, CPS2 and Neo Geo arcade machines.

Calice - http://calice.emuunlim.com/

An emulator for CPS1 and CPS2.

Trivia

External Links

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