The , also known as Capcom Play System 3 or CPS-3 for short, is an arcade system board that was the successor to Capcom's CP System and CP System II arcade hardware. It was first used in 1996 with the arcade game Red Earth. It would be the last proprietary system board Capcom would produce before moving on to the Dreamcast-based Naomi platform. The arcade system saw new releases up until mid 1999. Technical support for the CPS-3 ended on February 28, 2019. The CP System III also improved the number of colors and sprites on screen over its predecessor, the CP System II, and features native sprite scaling capabilities that all games on the system used. In place of the QSound sound chip found in its predecessor, the CP System III has a custom 16-channel stereo sound chip. The system also allowed for supported games to be displayed in widescreen; Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact is the only game that officially supported the feature.

The CP System III features a security mechanism; games are supplied on a CD, which contains the encrypted game contents, and a security cartridge containing the game BIOS and the SH-2 CPU with integrated decryption logic, with the per-game key stored in battery-backed SRAM. When the CP System III board is first powered on, the contents of the CD are loaded into a bank of Flash ROM SIMMs on the motherboard, where it is executed. The program code is then decrypted at run time via the security cartridge. The security cartridge is sensitive to any sort of tampering, which will result in the decryption key being erased and the cartridge being rendered useless. Games become unplayable if the security cartridge has been tampered with or when the battery inside the security cartridge dies. The lone exception is Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact, which uses a default set of decryption keys that are written to dead cartridges on boot, making emulation possible.

Capcom ceased manufacturing the CP System III hardware after 1999. Capcom ended most of the technical support for the hardware and its games on March 31, 2015. Battery replacements ended on February 28, 2019, ending all official support of the CP System III hardware and software.

Specifications

  • Main CPU: Hitachi HD6417099 (SH-2) at 25 MHz
  • RAM:
  • 512 KB Work RAM
  • 512 KB Sprite RAM
  • 8 MB Character RAM
  • 256 KB Color RAM
  • 32 KB SS RAM
  • Storage:
  • SCSI CD-ROM drive
  • Flash ROM: Variable amount, up to 8 × 16 MB
  • Sound chip: 16-channel 8-bit sample player, stereo
  • Maximum color palette: 16 million shades
  • Maximum number of colors on screen: 32,768 (15-bit colour, 555 RGB)
  • Palette size: 131,072 pens
  • Colors per tile (backgrounds / sprites): 64 (6 bits per pixel) or 256 (8 bits per pixel), selectable
  • Colors per tile (text overlay): 16 (4 bits per pixel)
  • Maximum number of objects: 1024, with hardware scaling