MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - firebeat update

Another good update once again thanks to the recent discs media improved support.

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May 7, 2023

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/8f05076b076adf494509d1ae5cbd2a6a07b25afa

konami/firebeat: Update pop'n music to use DVD CHDs + add clones for …
…popnanm and popnanm2 to allow for working license and expire license modes
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The PR description (below) should also be in the source file src/mame/konami/firebeat.cpp imo.
It is very informative and too good to be overlooked and be left off even though there are some brief comments already in the source file.

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Additionally, both popnanm and popnanm2 have a license period system presumably due to licensing agreements made with the anime studios in order to make these games. The dongles have the date they were made and the license period baked into the dongle, with the license period set to 5 years each. After 5 years when the license has expired, the games disable a bunch of graphics (basically anything that uses the logos or characters from the featured animes) and replace them with generic graphics.

Setting the period to 00/00 instead of 05/00 is enough to turn the dongles into "forever" license dongles, so I made the patch to the existing dongle dumps and marked them as BAD_DUMP because they're modified data. But probably a real forever license wouldn't be found in the wild.

The license expired versions have significant enough differences, even if it's a worse experience, to the fully featured versions so I added the expired license versions as clones and the forever license version as the parents.
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Be interesting to see other DVD related updates for other coinop games over the next few releases.