What's the point of suicide batterys in arcade games?

[Atariboy]

They make no sense to me. Is it just a way to make more money?

[Susuwatari]

I don't understand the concept of suicide battery either.

[Dav]

It makes it real hard to reverse engineer the encryption. The tables are stored in battery backed ram inside an epoxy blob. If you try to dig out the ram to read the table there's a real good chance you will break the battery connection and the table disapears.

 

I'm sure the fact that they'll make more money doesn't hurt either.

[Max-T]

I never understood the rationale behind suicide batteries either. It always seemed to me to be some sort of an attempt at assuring Capcom (or whatever manufacturer) would always have to be paid by game owners in order to keep their arcade machines viable.

 

It's not unlike the concept of built-in obsolescence in cars, or the dumb way that consumer DAT decks would refuse to make a second-generation copy of a recording.

 

So the concept was not new, but the logic behind it, IMHO, was flawed. Sucks to be he who owns an arcade game with a self-destruct mechanism on the system board!