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Hello there :) I am here from the underground arcade servers. We actually have majority of the games fully allowing anyone to run their own private servers, In most cases the cabinet itself acting as its own server and the games bootable in any windows install with no hardware checks. So worry not! the games will be safe and preserved for everyone to play at through multiple anime/game conventions for the rest of our lives.

First Bringus Studios, now Linus? Man. Everybody wants a Sega gaming PC!

As an owner of Japanese rhythm games In case of an investigation by any federal entity or similar, I do not have any involvement with this group or with the people in it, I do not know how I am here, probably added by a third party, I do not support any actions by members of this group.

This is the "genesis" to a new era of locked down gaming

man it's good to see James again on the main channel. we need more of him and Riley like the old days

SeaSONIC sponsoring a SEGA video is fitting.

Japan is truly the cyberjunk future of DRM technology.

"If you bought the hardware, and you bought the game, you should be allowed to play it." Any Japanese Game Company: And I took that personally.

Bringus studios made an awesome video about this too, very cool channel

I've worked on these machines before and when the game loses support the dev releases an update to make it offline local only. If your machine is offline during that update window it'll get bricked.

oh my god YES! I've been waiting so long for LTT to cover this. the world of "underground" network for arcade games, mainly arcade rhythm games, is fascinating.

Uh... I am familiar with this thing. I should be regarded as a group of people who are more familiar with SEGA arcade boards. Actually this video is pretty good, one of the few examples of "when he talks about my field, he talks really well". Linus mainly takes the ALLS substrate as the core, extends to the operation mode of the entire arcade industry, and related underground industries around this substrate. But there are also some slightly "misleading" conclusions: such as using SafeNet or other dongles to replace the original Keychip, the key chip. The actual process is more like: write a software that emulates Keychip → don't want this software to be pirated again → use a hardware dongle to protect the software used to emulate Keychip. The main function of the Keychip is to store game-related keys and some content related to authorization certification. There are some differences from dongles in the traditional sense, but not much. And those emulators are more to adapt to the input and output states of different games. In fact, ALLS is not only an arcade game distribution platform, but also acts as an IO middleware. Because many games do not directly communicate with human-computer interaction devices, but communicate through the IO interface provided by the ALLS system. Almost all arcade games these days are Windows games. Home versions can be made and released as long as the developer wishes. Speaking of ALLS itself, this video doesn't mention much. After all, most of the fans who follow this channel are hardware enthusiasts. The ALLS series has actually been born for a long time, and its common sub-models are: UX/UX2/HX/HX2/HX2.1 OP/MX/MX2, etc. Its algebra is mainly determined by the motherboard platform. For example, UX, HX, and MX all use Gigabyte MDH11BM motherboard, H110 chipset, and CPU is i5-6500. UX2/HX2/MX2 are Gigabyte MCH31AM motherboards, using H310 chipset, but the CPU is different. For example, HX2 is i3-8100, but MX2 is i5-8500. In terms of graphics cards, HX is based on GTX1050Ti, UX and other high-end models are based on GTX1070/RTX2070, and MX2 is based on GTX1060. The one in Linus' hands is obviously ALLS UX, i5-6500+GTX1070 model. With the development of arcade machines, the content of self-developed hardware in the chessboard is getting lower and lower. SEGA has grown from the glorious Model series of motherboards to the current ALLS series with interchangeable common parts for PCs. Not that this is a decline, after all, the cost is there. ALLS's previous generation of Nu substrates had at least one self-developed PCIe daughter board made of FPGA.

Oh boy, can't wait for ALLS units to triple in price now so arcades can no longer afford to get them second hand :^) Also, if you HAD to shout out a loader, you had to pick the one that's patreon-locked? I'm genuinely curious who you talked to in the scene because there's a lot of misinformation in here. Also also, if you bought the game on steam, why were you playing data?? If you HAD to run data, Puyo Puyo has a standalone offline version that probably would have flown a lot better then what you were using...

Love the stock videos depicting server scraping, reverse engineering and leakers at 06:11

Used to play MaiMai on my surface pro. The latency was awful and the game is super unstable, but the fact it runs at all is just incredible. My friend even got full combo with this setup

I have a Maimai and a Chunithm cab. I have so much love for the community thats running and handling the servers for it.

Before Blazblue was ever announced for consoles, there was a cracked arcade version making the rounds in the PC scene. I believe that game originally ran on Taito GX hardware, essentially also just a PC running Windows Embedded. Good times. A few early PC based arcade platforms ran on weird embedded Linux versions, possibly even from before the LinuxThreads to NPTL shift (which rendered tons of older Linux software unusable on modern systems), so I would imagine preserving or emulating those games would be quite a challenge. VMs are probably the way to go for later PC based arcade machines. The Seibu Kaihatsu machines like Raiden were probably the earliest big titles that used standard PC hardware, but that was still DOS era, so that can be emulated no problem on modern hardware. Also worth noting: Taxes are another major reason those systems are locked down to that degree. Cash registers also often run commodity hard- and software, and are super locked down as well.

Fun fact - sega was merged into the gambling corporation "sammy" in the mid 2000s, explaining some of the oddly high security on these things.

7:55 for those wondering: the prompt is asking if you have an Aime card. Green option: if you have Aime, scan the card Red option: guest play for those who don't have Aime The prompt that follows the no Aime option is roughly "Starting guest play without Aime, is this OK?" Source: I play maimai dx, and a prompt similar to that is in there too (albeit in English)

Crazy Taxi was Naomi (Dreamcast Based) it was Crazy Taxi 3's arcade release that was on Chihiro (Spent most of my life before going over to standard IT in the Arcade Industry and actually worked for Sega when the Naomi and Chihiro were being used)

Any dreams I had of owning my own arcade, are kinda being killed by this video. No wonder they are vanishing. Such a hassle.

2:54 My mind is blown. SF6 can run on TAITO X4, an arcade that has a GTX960 with only 2GB vram.

3:07 you're almost right on the GD-ROM drive! it's actually a modified CD-ROM format with higher data density co-developed by SEGA and Yamaha. it was used as the optical game distribution format for the Triforce, Chihiro, and NAOMI boards, as well as being the Dreamcast's optical media format. in its arcade iteration, games were dumped onto a RAM board at boot so as not to cause unnecessary wear on the drive during operation. Triforce was a collaboration between Namco, SEGA, and Nintendo (hence the name, as well as SEGA and Namco being allowed to develop titles based on Nintendo franches for the system, those being F-Zero and Mario Kart respectively). Yamaha and SEGA had a good relationship, having developed bespoke sound processors for the Saturn and Dreamcast together, SEGA having previously used off-the-shelf Yamaha tech for their arcade boards (YM2151) and the Mega Drive (YM2612). hope this is interesting to someone 💜

Arcade hardware has always been really locked down. I have a small collection of arcade hardware dating back to the CPS2, the latest being a TTX3, to be useful to me everything is hacked or modded in some way. There are some challenges to preservation: 1) They may not even release the game to home systems 2) If they do, they can be missing vital features. For example Gundam Seed Rengou VS ZAFT is a 2v2 LAN game at the arcade. The PS2 version only let's you do 2p split screen, no LAN...

This video is the end of sega acrade data community. Good jobs linus

I wonder if there is something similar with DDR cabinets. There is an arcade near me that I would play DDR sometimes, and one day when I went in, it seemed like it was the same hardware, but they had completely different software on it and it was almost like a DDR clone with different songs.

"....in 1995. I was alive." Thanks for the Short Circuit movie reference. 😁😆

Those snipped off serial cables made me laugh. I could picture some guy just not wanting to go through the trouble unscrewing the securing pins or dealing with the annoyance of all those trailing cables and just cutting them off and letting the buyer sort it out.

This isnt the first time Sega has done things like this. At the arcade I used to do repairs at we had the Dinosaur King mini arcade and the cards themselves came with a little NFC chip (litterally a large poker chip) that would trip itself when the card count was reached. This prompted you to buy a new NFC and a bundle of cards so kids could play "Rock, Paper, Scissors." The game would softlock on the bootup until the NFC was replaced with a fresh one. Wish we had a Flipper back then lol.

the bringus infection is spreading

I was a Slot machine tech and this sounds a lot like what they do with slot machines. Except in that case it's more about security, preventing tax evasion and tracking for money laundering.

Crazy Taxi Arcade wasn't running on the Chihiro board it was running on the Naomi board which is just a modified dreamcast. The Chihiro board wasn't available till 2002 and crazy taxi arcade came out in 1999.

it's a decently informative and well-researched video but it would have been better for the sake of the scene (and preservation) not to make something this visible about it

It sucks that it is difficult for younger generations to experience these timeless legends without going through hoops one way or another

That Michael Jacksson "he-he" caught me offguard and I just lost it! Well played

I wasn't ready for the, "...reverse engineering (hehe)..." at 6:12 🤣

8:27 "Just doesn't seem like SEGA doesn't care about this game that much" Yeah lol it totally isn't one of their biggest e-sports titles in Japan

Surely this will not cause issues for private networks lol

Wild how arcade run older hardware and yet have great quality and stability. Hope to see more content like this.

Yes! The Seaman reference at 8:09 is excellent! Well done!

Yessss, loving James getting to co-present a main channel video again! He's got a different (but still great!) energy to Linus, and it's refreshing to shake it up

When he said "Back when I was happy" and laughed to cover the pain, I felt that in my core.

I love it how my build is always there center of their Seasonic ad every time, lol. Cheers!

I am shocked to see an LTT video on the world of underground arcade games. I'm a huge rhythm gamer and sometimes the lack of legitimate support in the western world is frustrating, driving an hour and a half away to the nearest Round One to play Sound Voltex is agony.

Bringus Studio moment

They should've called it "Basic Amusement Linkage Live System"

You, the government, everyone can always tell me that piracy is illegal and wrong, but piracy is never wrong when these companies will ensure you dont have access to games you legally purchased to play.

We got what NintenDon’t!

man it really shouldn't be this hard to just be able to _play_ rhythm games I want my ongeki and chunitm that isn't outdated :(((((

Why did it feel so natural seeing James doing the segue to the sponsor, man he should be in more videos

"(...) reverse engineering (...)": shows an engineer walking backwards. Props to the editor!

6:25 and its great because this is the only real option for people wanting to play these games, since the companies (sega) just refuse to put official cabs in the west.

50/50 revenue split is what shocked me most 😮

Love the way people that aren't into Puyo Puyo will immediately gravitate toward "The Fish" Universally appealing character

I WAS NEVER EXPECTING LINUS WOULD MAKE A VIDEO ON THIS. BUT THANK YOUU!!

I saw an ALLS system here in Texas. I knew that's what it was because the game (House of the Dead, IIRC) was having problems and rebooting occasionally. That was in a public arcade not owned by Sega. I wonder if that was a bootleg (!) or if ALLS systems are truly available in the US too.

James does so well in every video style, always holds my entertainment and gives a good laugh

Arcade machines went from being 10 years ahead, to 10 years behind.

TeknoParrot ex-developer here; back in the day (~2017 or so) in the early days of TeknoParrot, we had access to a bunch of these machines, and we used various OS and chip exploits to basically get shells and tools on the OS and retrieved the decrypted data that way (or tools like wireshark to capture packets) and then reverse engineered the data to recreate the various messages required by the game to launch/play. Initially it was either a local-only emulator (or just patching memory to fake the responses) to make the machines think they were online but had no internet connection, and in the recent years actually writing emulated servers for them to have true compatibility. A lot of these games also required regular memory patches to make them work on hardware they weren't meant for (i.e. AMD gpus), Sega liked using NVidia-only GL extensions for their Initial D games so we had to patch a bunch of code for the games to even display any output on systems with AMD GPUs

i saw bringus studios cover this

These underground networks operate under threat from Sega but more importantly BandaiNamco that they wont make this knowledge easily accessible to anyone who wants to play these games at home. They are sympathetic that they aren't meeting the demand for their games, but they are only ever gonna accept the arcade industry's return in North America, and not pirated home play, as you can see in Japan.

knowing that Sega is currently owned by SAMMY corporation, a Japanese company known for making pachinko machines (which is a predatory gambling machine), and that the only reason they bought Sega was to offset their reputation, this doesn't surprise me.

A lot of country in Southeast Asia have arcade game culture, and because of that we got a lot of cool relatively new arcade, though mostly rhythm games as J-pop and ACG-related music are popular here. We just recently got Chunithm after huge request from local gamer :))

Papa Bringus sends his regards

the days of dreamcast seem like a distant memory now

out of curiosity, is there an indie level arcade industry? not like knock offs but a modern update to the arcade game variety? an indie arcade industry? steam arcade?

This would have been soo much better if filmed on location at some arcades that do this, with some anonymous interviews with arcade owners and some hardcore arcade gamers that enjoy these games. Would be cool to see LTT do some tech journalism or even documentary type videos

Correction: Australia and America does have ALLS games. However in America's case the only game available there officially is Hatsune Miku's Project Diva exclusive to Round1 because licensing. Meanwhile Australia has Chunithm, Maimai and a tiny number of Initial D four sets based in Sydney and one in Melbourne (probably because no one would want to buy IDAC with only the core UI translated as per export versions of the game, lack of knowledge of the game's existence or lack of demand because wangan midnight exists which pretty much prints money). The recent model I know of, the ALLS MX2.1, includes an 8th gen core i5 and a 1660ti.

Wow! I thought arcades bought the machines outright and not pay a percentage to the dev.

6:52 "I was alive" That something an unalive person would say

that engineer moonwalking is just gold! 6:11

This just in: LTT learns about what arcade operators have been hating on for years Edit: watched the whole thing and now LTT has been added to the list of things for the arcade operators to hate

Imagine if developers /companies had a culture of just open sourcing code they don’t want to support anymore.

That Michael Jackson "eeeheee" at 6:11 had me in tears lmfao 🤣

0:00 - you telling me this is an "All Sux"

Great editing on this one imo. You guys could do so much with arcade cabinet setups, audio set ups for PCs (DACs/speakers, etc.), printers/scanners even. Lots of areas untouched for so long, even if nothing much has changed.

To say I'm disappointed is an understandment. These scenes are underground for a reason. So long as it stayed small and out of view it made no financial sense to take legal action. Hell, some of these companies are in the scene just to keep tabs and negociate with the operators. I hope those back channels stay open and the damage is minimized from unnecessary exposure.

Arcade was so much better then a limited console in the 90's. But now you have Gran Tourismo and stuff like that. And VR with a moving chair is the best.

The round 1 near my house USED to have the Initial D game, and they even had the ID cards. They had it in full Japanese for the "whole experience" but I imagine they just couldn't get a translated version. Sucks cuz it was probably the coolest game my round 1 had.

Linus should build a dispenser from tf2 as a computer

Good to see James back presenting LTT videos!!

Biggest surprise about this video is that there are still arcades going. I've been an adamant preserver of arcade ROM's for the last 25 years. But the fact that arcades have survived past 2002, is a major surprise.

Awesome video. I grew up playing console and PC games so the whole arcade world is pretty foreign to me. Love content like this!

I remember a smaller tech channel getting their hands on a SEGA pc and doing a video on this same thing. He couldn’t get in though last time I checked. EDIT: I just check the description, they actually referenced the dude!! Holy shit that’s cool.

6:12 that MJ sound with the clip playing in reverse got me spitting my food laughing 😂😂😂 such a nice touch. Kudos to the editor

Yea, SEGA doesn't care about about Puyo 🥲 ...in the West. In Japan, that's a gigantic franchise.

Unsubbing because your response GamersNexus is unprofessional. The countless jokes about "here's our sponsor" will now leave a bitter taste in the mouths of those who once valued your opinion

Why can't anyone pronounce Sega correctly? It's literally yelled at the beginning of its most popular game of all time. SAY-GUH!

Thanks Linus for trying to show the people that we do need preservation, but also release your Japanese exclusive to the states

This kind of control over hardware makes me super, super mad

I thought i’d never see a day when there would be an arcade stick on LTT. Sick

Whenever I think piracy might be morally wrong a company like SEGA comes along and convinces me of the opposite. Thank you, SEGA!

The editor that made James speak like kermit every now and then 💀

0:35 - Time to short every pin

Everyone should Unsubscribe from this channel until they release an apology video about gamers nexus and hardware unboxed. I just unsubscribed and you should do they same if you value honestly in your product reviews. Quit rushing your content willingly making errors and still releasing it to the public. Very disingenuous numbers and takes in LTT videos we the content consumers must hold them accountable.

I thought this video was going to be about the Sega Terra Drive. It was an IBM PC with a built in Mega Drive (Genesis if you're American). There was also the Amstrad Mega PC, which was a similar idea. I wanted one so much when I was a kid

We need more of old faces + new faces, because recently Linus always appear in every video. I missed Anthony.

7:26 EU law states that any bought product may always be used, which may involve circumventing any mechanisms preventing such. They really oughta enact the same law in the US.

It looks like an old dell optiplrx 3020, and has pretty much the specs of it.