As far as I remember, it was never really proved that the chihiro games are running on the xbox.
As Crazy Taxi exists as console game for the xbox, the video might as well be showing that.
We have chihiro hardware in our Arcade park. Besides the fact that the disks are GDROM instead of CDROM or DVDROM, they also come together with a small encryption chip that acts as a protection dongle. The purpose of that device is to protect the game against copiing. The author who told that he could run Crazy Taxi on the xbox never mentionned a word about that protection chip. This is at least a little strange.
I suppose you could rip a GDROM with a dreamcast console, but I doubt a lot of people still have the knowledge to do this.
It's hard to know why Sega is using a GDROM. (Besides being difficult to copy.) Harddisk have proven to be unreliable in arcade machines. (Sometimes a 200KG machine is moved without shutting down the disk first....),
but the optical drives aren't much better.
The chihiro copies the game from the GDROM to a huge ramdisk with a battery backup.
The GDROM drive is connected to the unit with an interface connector that looks like a SCSI. It has an embedded blower to keep it cool, so it collects a lot of dust. Due to that, after a couple of years, you get read errors as well on those units. Usually cleaning the disc and blowing out the dust solves the issue for another period.
Upon a reboot, the chihiro hardware checks the game in the ramdisk and boots it if the information still appears to be fine. If the crc check or hash (wathever they use) fails, the game is loaded again from the GDROM.
One question we could ask is about the 512MB memory. Does that refer to the ramdisk or does it refer to the internal memory of the chihiro? For a ramdisk, it would be rather small as a GDROM can contain approx. 1Gig of data.
Another question is the protection dongle. Does it decrypt the data that comes from the GDROM, or does it decrypt the data that goes from the ramdisk to the chihiro itself. Some people even say that the ram is actually the system ram of the system that is upgradable.
If I look at the house of the dead console game and compare it to the arcade version, I can hardly see a difference. The credit notes are even still on the screen. So, if they can make pretty much the same game running in 64MB, why would they need 512MB?
A lot of the things I write here are just speculations about things. But I can ensure you that the protection dongle is not a speculation.
Another issue is the fact that Sega brings out pretty much all their arcade games for the home consoles a couple of months after they released the arcade. Because of that, the income of the arcades are seriously reduced, so that they hardly pay off. Because of that, arcade owners simply don't buy new amusement machines anymore. Sega is pretty much killing their own (arcade) market working that way. It's not much related to the topic, but still worth thinking about.
regards.
