Collaborate Disseminate
If you buy any kind of electronic gadget today, chances are it’s powered by a microcontroller with a program stored in its internal flash ROM. That program’s code is often …read more Continue reading A 1970s Mask ROM Microcontroller Spills Its Secrets
ROM dumping is vital for preserving old hardware, and we’ve seen many hacks dedicated to letting someone dump a ROM and send its contents to some hacker stuck with a …read more Continue reading A Disposable Dumper For ROM Chips With A Pi Pico
When it comes to vintage consoles like the Game Boy, it’s often nice to be able to dump cartridge ROMs for posterity, for archival, and for emulation. To that end, …read more Continue reading Dumping Game Boy Cartridges Via The Link Cable Port
Retro gaming enthusiasts have always had great interest in rarities outside the usual commercial titles. Whether they be early betas, review copies, or even near-complete versions of games that never made it to release, these finds can be inordinately valuable. [Modern Vintage Gamer] recently came across a pre-release version of …read more
If a Game Boy was a part of your childhood, you were probably more than once dreaming of spending your entire school day with it. Well, they had to wait a few more years for that, but eventually in 2015, [Asger], [baekalfen], and [troelsy] made that dream reality when they …read more
Continue reading Snakes And Ladders: Game Boy Emulator In Python
Nostalgia is a funny thing. That desire we all get to relive past memories can make you do things that in any other scenario would be out of the question. The effect seems even stronger when it comes to old video games. How else can you explain buying the same games over and over every time they get “remastered” for the next generation of consoles? But what if those remasters aren’t good enough?
If you have a burning desire to play a 100% accurate version of certain old arcade games, you might have your work cut out for you. Getting …read more
There is a huge variety of hardware out there with a font of some form or other baked into the ROM. If it’s got a display it needs a font, and invariably that font is stored as a raster. Finding these fonts is trivial – dump the ROM, render it as a bitmap, and voilà – there’s your font. However, what if you’re trying to dump the font from a vintage Apple 410 Color Plotter? It’s stored in a vector format, and your job just got a whole lot harder.
The problem with a vector font is that the letters …read more
Continue reading Extracting A Vector Font From A Vintage Plotter
If you’ve got a SEGA Dreamcast kicking around in a closet somewhere, and you still have the underutilized add-on Visual Memory Unit (VMU), you’re in for a treat today. If not, but you enjoy incredibly detailed hacks into the depths of slightly aged silicon, you’ll be even more excited. Because [Dmitry Grinberg] has a VMU hack that will awe you with its completeness. With all the bits in place, the hacking tally is a new MAME emulator, an IDA plugin, a never-before ROM dump, and an emulator for an ARM chip that doesn’t exist, running Flappy Bird. All in a …read more
Continue reading Completely Owning the Dreamcast Add-on You Never Had
Preserving old arcade games is a niche pastime that can involve some pretty serious hacking skills. If the story here were just that someone pulled the chip from a game, took it apart, and figured out the ROM contents, that’d be pretty good. But the real story is way stranger than that.
Apparently, a bunch of devices were sent to a lab to be reverse engineered and were somehow lost. Nearly ten years later, the devices reappeared, and another group has taken the initiative to recover their contents. The chip in question was part of a 1989 arcade game called …read more
Continue reading Rebonding an IC to Save Tatakae! Big Fighter
[Micah Elizabeth Scott], aka [scanlime], has been playing around with USB drawing tablets, and got to the point that she wanted with the firmware — to reverse engineer, see what’s going on, and who knows what else. Wacom didn’t design the devices to be user-updateable, so there aren’t copies of the ROMs floating around the web, and the tablet’s microcontroller seems to be locked down to boot.
With the easy avenues turning up dead ends, that means building some custom hardware to get it done and making a very detailed video documenting the project (embedded below). If you’re interested in …read more
