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Update []:
It's been almost three years since the trial version of Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode was recovered, but there's just been an exciting new development related to the "lost" entry in the Final Fantasy VII subseries.
Thanks to the ROM hack and feature phone preservationist Yuvi, the full game has finally been preserved, ensuring that more people can experience this missing piece of Final Fantasy history.
The news was announced yesterday by Yuvi in a blog post. Here, he stated that the feature phone preservation group had obtained the game's data, thanks to another Keitai Wiki community member, Naoya Shinota, who was in touch with someone who owned the full version of the rare mobile game and had volunteered to dump their SD card.
As the blog notes, though, this proved only the first step in bringing the game back to life, with the group needing to decrypt the SD card's contents, which required "a special partition from the SD card to start the brute-force process to find the keys," — something which the team didn't have access.
"This was the first time we have encountered such an issue," Yuvi wrote. "Because normally we are the ones who have possession of the SD card, so we could get the secret key needed. And well, unfortunately, even two years later we never got that. So this past week I said enough is enough; I’m going to solve this issue. We have the data; we just need to unencrypt it."
In the blog, Yuvi goes over some of the challenges involved in this, before revealing he eventually made his own distributed brute-force program to help, even going so far as to make his own GPU farm to speed up the process.
"I spun up well over 90 GPU Servers to crunch these numbers so fast, spanning from RTX 4090s, A4000s, A4500s, A5000s, RTX 6000s H200, and more," wrote Yuvi. "To the point I had over 125 active clients crunching away. All of these combined, I was putting out nearly 5,500 GKeys/s. That’s well over 70x as fast as my single 7900XTX could put out... All said and done, this cluster and software I made had chomped through and found all the decryption keys in roughly 72 hours."
He continued, "Now, I’m not going to lie and say it was still cheap; in total, this endeavour to save one game cost me well over $900 dollars, all said and done. But in my books it was well worth something we may have never had the opportunity of getting again."
You can read Yuvi's full blog post here.
Original Story []: A lost piece of Final Fantasy VII history has just been preserved, thanks to a group of researchers of Japanese feature phones.
As reported on Twitter by RockmanCosmo, the demo of Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode, which came pre-installed on DoCoMo p903i feature phone devices, has now been successfully preserved, thanks to the individual xyz.
It even runs on Doja 5.1 SDK, with @m3M0RyHuN73R, usernameak, @XLeonier, and @XerShadowTail helping to get the game running on the emulator. As RockmanCosmo notes, the emulation isn't perfect for the moment (with the game still suffering from audio issues and not exactly running unevenly), but hopefully, when an improved Doja emulator comes along (like SquirrelJME), these issues will be a thing of the past.
Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode came out in 2006 in North America and in 2007 in Japan, and was a midquel to the Final Fantasy VII sequel, Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII, for the PS2. It was a collaboration between Square Enix and a London studio, Ideaworks3D (which also worked on the N-Gage and Pocket PC ports of Tomb Raider). The demo apparently includes a fairly large portion of the game, but there is already a lead on someone who may have access to the full version on a p903i device.
You can check out some footage of the demo of the game below.