Hi All My USB Dongle for Tetris The Grandmaster III has stopped working. Can/Will Taito repair my broken USB Dongle? Has anybody else's USB dongle been damaged? If so, how did you repair it? Are there any specialists out there who can repair them? Thanks in advance.
Very sorry but so far there are no solutions for this. This is the reason why people don't like the Type-X. The dongles have a limited life expectancy and generally stop working after some years.
As far as I know TaitoTech do repairs on dongles for a fee but I haven't used their service personally.
When I bought my kit from Tops Game / Sophia Corp in 2014, I had trouble with the dongle when it arrived; it would boot for at most 1~2 minutes and then error out (if it'd even boot past the security check at all). When I returned the dongle, they said they would try their best to find me a new one or have the old one repaired by Taito. At that time, they said the quote they received from Taito for the repair costs was 14,620 yen. (Thankfully in this case they were able to locate and send a new dongle to replace the defective one.) According to this AO thread, you can contact ovs@taito.co.jp (the contact e-mail listed on the English page for the arcade division) if you're overseas and they can help liaise requests for repairs.
Same situation here. The dongle is faulty and i have not been able to play for 5 years now... Hopefully Taito will reply
Keep us posted! My dongle is faulty too and I've been procrastinating reaching out about having it repaired.
So their mail address works, here is their answer: """ Thank you for your inquiry. Our repair service for the dongle is available. Please send your us the dongle to the following address; TAITO CORPORATION SHINJUKU EASTSIDE SQUARE 2F, 6-27-30 SHINJUKU, SHINJUKU-KU, TOKYO 160-8447 JAPAN TEL：+81-3-6361-8381 Repair charge would be around JPY20000, depends on defectives. Roundtrip shipping charge is also needed. """ I have nothing else to say than; damn that's expensive... But the only solution as far as I know. Maybe if all people with faulty dongle spam them, they are gonna realize how crappy their design was and offer us the repair for free lol
Has someone ever tried reverse-engineering how the dongle works so that we can make our own version of it ? (At least to be able to copy data from a working dongle to the replacement so that we don't have to involve Taito)
Type-X dongles are Feitian Rockey 100 dongles, which is a type of SIM card reader that has long since been discontinued by Feitian (I'm guessing Taitotech has stockpiled enough spares to use for repairs). The SIM card is programmed with a decryption key, and the Type-X launcher reads this key from the dongle to decrypt the game image. Since the authenticity of a Type-X game kit mostly revolves around original hardware and matching serial numbers I really don't see the value of cloning dongles outside of bootlegging for profit. If you're just interested in playing the game, the decrypted game software is out there in the wild and if you care about cycle accuracy the decrypted game runs identically as long as you run it on original Type-X hardware. You're treading deeply into the grey area of what is acceptable to discuss here on TC.
