this is a gaming PC made by Sega of all
people called the a-l-l-s-u-x which
sounds kind of weird but that's not nearly as weird as the fact that it's
for sale today for use in arcade games
it's got a 6 gen Core i5 processor a GTX
1070 16 gigs of RAM and it runs on
Windows 10 iot Enterprise for the 250
bucks we paid for it it's actually a pretty decent little machine at least it
would be if it weren't locked down with BitLocker encryption a BIOS password and
always online DRM in order to boot into the installed OS we need a USB key chip
that's forever owned by Sega a router with sega's VPN pre-installed and an IP
address that's white listed on saga's servers none of which you are likely to
get if you're not in Asia and on very good terms with their arcade sales
division sega's not Asia's but why are things so locked down being because
money that USB key chip doesn't just act
as a key to boot up Windows it collects sales data about the machine even when
it's offline and sends it back to Sega so that they can ensure that they're
getting their cut of the coins dropped into the machine but aside from a few
exceptions in large chain arcades none of these games ever make it to Western
countries legally so how is it that you can find Game Machines like Initial D
Taiko drum master or blaze blue running perfectly in nearly every major city
turns out there's a clandestine network of hackers enthusiasts and
preservationists that are working not only to make these games available in
their regions but to offer Network support and updates while giving life to
features and games well after they're retired by their creators truly God's
work but how do these underground networks come to be in the first place
what would happen if they were to suddenly shut down and can we still play
games on this machine right here or is our only remaining form of entertainment
Segways to sponsors like see Sonic if
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options for any build learn more at csonic.com it's pretty normal inside the
computer except this is a robust case if
you can imagine someone getting angry at the game and hitting the side of the arcade cabinet you don't want that to
cause a shutdown for your business so I guess all the steel makes sense other
weird thing is the serial cables coming off the back which are just snipped off
on ours we think this one would govern things like the coin operation of the
arcade cabinet and then these would work the lights there was once a time when
each arcade machine would be purpose built but for the last 30 years or so
they've been largely shells with familiar hardware for example Mario Kart
GP runs on the Triforce a GameCube modified for arcades the new Street
Fighter 6 runs on the title type X4 a PC
with a 4th Gen i5 and a GTX 960 and
games like Crazy Taxi were released for the Chihiro a slightly modified Xbox
with its DVD drive swapped out for a
gd-rom like some kind of Microsoft Dreamcast abomination
the way the software works is familiar too the name alls stands for amusement
linkage live system and as implied it's
meant to be connected to a network at all times so it can not only be
monitored and updated but also so that new games can be added to it kind of
like steam in a similar manner players that use their Sega ime identifier card
will have things like high scores and game progress saved on sega's servers so
it can be used on any other machine at any other arcade they can also store
credits purchase with cash right on the machine but in exchange for access to
this system Sega requires that arcade operators not only buy the machines
outright and maintain them themselves but also split all revenues 50 50 with
Sega they aren't the only ones either it's a similar situation with the other
Majors that make up this oligopoly Bandai namco's bana passport Titus nises
and the OG arcade network of the bunch konami's e amuse movement so what are
small arcades to do assuming they're not
owned by one of those major companies which also is a thing well they could
install a fresh version of Windows onto the box and run an emulator techno
parrot is an emulator capable of running newer arcade games on a wide breadth of
Hardware including the very systems they were designed for
but like most emulators ROMs are not
provided and it can take some time to figure out the optimal configurations
for each game they also lack a lot of
the online features like events and updates though Lan and netplay is
supported by titles the other option these companies have is private servers
if you played World of Warcraft at any point you're probably familiar with the
idea of private servers and this scenario shares a lot of similarities
these work essentially as drop-in Replacements of the official servers
just without the officialness server operators often tweak the features they
offer to differentiate themselves from the vanilla experience usually unlocking
far more than the official release unlike wow private servers however these
require Hardware to get through the client encryption those key chips that
we mentioned earlier we've unfortunately been unable to acquire any photos but
through talking with some arcade owners we found out that the existing
underground networks use some kind of Hardware that's plugged into USB likely
an fpga or something like a modified safe net I key in order to spoof the key
chip and get everything decrypted judging by bring a Studio's video on the
Halls it seems that many systems share key chips obviously not the greatest
security practice but getting past the key chip is only a small portion of the
journey for the private servers to act as one-to-one drop-in replacements for
the real thing their outputs have to match the outputs expected from the
official servers and doing this is a bit of a black art involving scraping server
data reverse engineering or sometimes the assistance of leakers
but even after one private server pulls it off they aren't likely to share their
code publicly which means that if an existing Network gets shut down it could
be game over for good if that happened to the private Network's underpinning
Western all systems arcades would lose dozens of games their online play save
states DLC and network-wide leaderboards it would be catastrophic businesses
would close and that's true of bootlegs of any of the big four networks and
that's to say nothing of the threat to game preservation these closed
ecosystems pose look at this hotel of you an add-on for the super famicon
released back in 1995. I was alive it
distributed unique game levels and events to those subscribed to the
service but only within a limited release window typically a couple of
weeks never to be played again in 2023
some of these releases have been recovered but many more are known to be
lost and an unknown number have been forgotten completely and that's a major
reason why many believe that piracy of these systems is justifiable if you
bought the hardware and you bought the game you should be allowed to play it
they say well we bought this Hardware we
bought your Champions on Steam we have techno parrot with a copy of the arcade
release of the game sure we're lacking the case lights and the coin op
controllers that would normally plug into the serial ports on the back but those are incidental let's game
interesting thing about this machine there's no on button so as soon as you
switch on the power supply it's just on we're running off a different SSD now
because encryption but here's a game puyapuyu with my Razer Gamepad oh gosh
oh my God I don't speak Japanese
no what was it asking me okay who should I be uh the the least
human one the fish yes I relate to that one yes yes this is
like Bizarro land Tetris I'd rather have a d-pad than a joystick that's probably
sacrilege to some people oh no this guy's just dropping a graveyard on me
here we do have other games but we don't want to risk playing them
because we don't want to attract the ire of sega's lawyers and it just seems like
Sega doesn't care about this game as much so that's why we went for it oh a
giant blob this crazy crazy like the
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below if you like this video check out the time that we DIY the whole arcade
cabinet a long long time ago back when I
was