The CPS-1 or Capcom Play System 1 is an arcade system board by Capcom that debuted in 1988 with Forgotten Worlds and Ghouls 'n Ghosts. Street Fighter II, one of the most popular fighting games of all time, ran on this board. After a number of arcade game boards designed to run only one game, Capcom embarked upon a project to produce a system board that could be used to run multiple games, in order to reduce hardware costs and make the system more appealing to arcade operators. The system was plagued by many bootleg versions of its games. In particular, there were so many bootleg versions of Street Fighter II, they were often more common in arcades than the official version. This problem was virtually eliminated by Capcom in the later CPS-2. The CPS-1 hardware was also utilized in Capcom's unsuccessful attempt at home console market penetration, the CPS Changer.
The CPS-2 or Capcom Play System 2 is an arcade system board that debuted in 1993 with Super Street Fighter 2, and Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom. The earlier Capcom system board, CPS-1, while successful, was very vulnerable to bootleggers making unauthorized copies of the games. In order to rectify the situation, Capcom took the CPS-1 hardware (with QSound) with minimal changes and employed encryption on the program ROMs to prevent software piracy. The CPS-2 consists of 2 separate parts; the A board, which connects to the JAMMA harness and contains components common between all CPS-2 games, and the B board, which contains the game itself. The relationship between the A and B board is basically the same as that between a home video game console and cartridge. The B boards hold battery-backed memory containing decryption keys needed for the games to run. As time passes, these batteries lose their charge and the games stop functioning, because the CPU cannot execute any code without the decryption keys. This is known to hobbyists as the "suicide battery." Due to the heavy encryption, it was believed for a long time that CPS-2 emulation was next to impossible. However, in January 2001, the CPS-2 Shock group was able to obtain unencrypted program data by hacking the hardware and provided XOR difference tables to produce this data from ROM images, making emulation possible, as well as restoring cartridges that had been erased because of the suicide system. (Source: Wikipedia)
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