Chip decapping and decoding

[trm]

I know this has been covered once or twice before in relation to the MAME work, but this guy has automated the process to a level I've not seen before. Given some okayish quality decap shots he can machine read hex straight from the images!

http://oamajormal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/fun-with-masked-roms.html

<tangent>

And a nice touch in the comments at the bottom - once again giving geeks a reputation for being assholes 'Guru' comes in and refuses to explain the MAME decap work. It always bugged me that they were unraveling others' intellectual property (for the greater good, I agree) but he wouldn't explain the processes they used. I guess it seems likely now that he didn't know what they were, but found it easier to claim 'it's secret' than make clear his ignorance.</tangent>

 

[IDCHAPPY]

Nice pictures

 

[Alpha1]

Nice pictures

Haha yeah I was just thinking that

 

[andyman]

Pretty much self explanatory really, 1's & 0's represented by blobs of solder, cool

Nice pictures too, obviously

Must get some nitric acid now !!

 

[Alpha1]

Yeah I got the binary bit - just bamboozled by how the program could read the image, as some of it was very blurry.

 

[cools]

It's not a Microsoft product

 

[andyman]

Yeah I got the binary bit - just bamboozled by how the program could read the image, as some of it was very blurry.

Was more for Ian's benefit, I'd hope you'd understand the binary bit by now

 

[trm]

Part of it still needs human intervention - if the generated hex doesn't match known opcodes you start flipping bits until you get opcodes (and for stuff like 68000) and sane addressing modes. Would imagine this is a lot easier on simpler instruction sets where there aren't 6 different types of addressing mode signified by single bit changes.

Andy - I've got plenty of nitric in the garage. Not boiled it up recently to drive off the water and make it fuming, but I'm sure I've got a respirator around. Or we could just chew chalk and hold our breath

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