This is incredibly awesome work, and I envy students who can actually take a course in this stuff!
However it makes me realize in what kind of weirdly antagonistic society we live. In an ideal universe, you could just ask the Nintendo engineers for the chip layouts, or for the boot ROM. It reminds me of a documentary I saw the other day where they tested the chicken content of chicken salad. Again, in an ideal universe, you could just ask the manufacturer. Of course that would be naive in the real world, since manufacturers and consumers have different interests. Most of the time we don't notice anything weird about this. A bit of competition is usually considered a good thing. But every now and then I have a WTF moment... Why are we working against each other? How much productivity do we loose through duplication of effort? Are the losses from this smaller or bigger than the gains from healthy competition? I have no great answer for that...
Oh and sorry for hijacking the comment area for a rant about the world and so on ;-).
An hour goes by and no one has called me on this? "Basic Income" and "no 'currency' to speak of" seem contradictory. I'd go for no currency rather than BI now that I think of it. Replicators for everyone!
If you're interested in that kind of stuff I highly reccomend watching Karsten Nohl's "Reviving smart card analysis" talk from Chaos Communication Camp 2011 [0].
Basically he takes pictures of the circuits on the smart card and then reverses the logic from that.
There's even software to assist with that [1].
As a pure software guy I was pretty baffeled when I saw this the first time.
There was also a great talk at Defcon 21 (last year) walking through a similar process all the way to using a picture of the ROM and image recognition to pull binary data. The first half is about building the lab to do this kind of work so you can skip the first 1/3 - 1/2 if you don't care about that part.
For fuck sake, is it possible to have a HN comments page without complaints about the design of TFA? Speak to the author if you have a problem with their site! Don't mumble about it from a distance!
I think it's useful to point out egregious bad behavior in web design/implementation. Others can learn from the mistake, or people who wouldn't necessarily see something wrong with it can learn from the backlash it generates.
Not to mention that if you click on any of the images to view the larger version of the images, hitting the back button resets you to the top of the page and you have to re-navigate to where you were. And this is in the latest version of Chrome on a Mac.
I always open these up in a new tab (usually can be done fast with third click, or ctrl+click), then close the tab when I'm done. It's fast, you can keep reading the original site while the image/webpage/whatever loads, and the problem you mention never happens.
That is div#gadget-dock. It technically located beneath the blog post, but it has a fixed position that is on top of the scroll bar. It has a z-index of 3000, which puts it on top of everything else.
I spent a fair bit of time trying to find an article or something about this, but came up empty. I was especially curious to know how you can decode the program's bits from the silicon.
As the last image shows, the ROM table values are extracted by graphics processing the photo.
It's also possible to dump the ROM by reading it byte by byte, but this depends on the architecture (not always possible) and is typically done for mask ROMs that contain data.
That's the guy's apartment. I guess he lives and breaths electronics (but not the fumes, he has an exhaust for soldering).
Nice setup. I was almost expecting an RF anechoic chamber for the bedroom. The bonus would be you can shut the door, and it would be a very quiet sleeping space.
As someone who knows nothing about this stuff, can someone explain to me how soaking the CPU in sulfuric acid removes the packaging material, but does no harm to the chip inside?
I have a couple of fully functional examples on my desk that say otherwise. If you actually want to keep the device usable to the point that you can still solder it to a board, then you normally preserve most of the package, bond wires, and leadframe which requires more care during decap. For this particular specimen we didn't bother because we just wanted the ROM.
It seems that way. This looks similar to what byuu did for SNES games. Some SNES games have special dedicated chips, and decapping them allows you to recreate the logic. It's an expensive and very difficult process though, which is why it's rare to actually see someone attempt it in the open.
I never understood this arguement. So Nintendo do not pick the most powerful CPU/GPU available. Why does that really matter? It is a lot more powerful than the device before it and it has amazing games on it still.
With a handheld the most important number, to me, is battery life. I still feel that Nintendo (and Sony) could do more by using a more efficient or lower power chip and get a couple more hours out of the device.
Then again I do not care that much for graphics so perhaps my opinion is in the minority. There are several things I would change about the 3DS if I could but upping the processing power is not one of them.
Less power means longer battery life, and it doesn't matter as long as the games are fun. The game being fun is much more important than how new the processor is.
It's been like that for a long time. I'd argue that for mobile devices, you don't really need that much power anyway to make something fun and adapted to the format. The PSP is still selling well in Japan and developers are still making game for it to this day.
In the end, it's the experience of the games you care about that matters.
I bought my 3DS for basically 3 games, and while the graphics don't compare to my phone or tablet, the fact that I can even have them in a portable form factor prevents me from caring that it's underpowered.
It is like the Mac/PC or Android/iPhone hardware question. If someone cares how many cores their computer has then they will probably shop for an Android phone with a fancy processor. Most Mac buyers pick "the cheap one", "the middle one", or "the fast one" and couldn't tell you how much ram, or which processor is inside their laptop.
However it makes me realize in what kind of weirdly antagonistic society we live. In an ideal universe, you could just ask the Nintendo engineers for the chip layouts, or for the boot ROM. It reminds me of a documentary I saw the other day where they tested the chicken content of chicken salad. Again, in an ideal universe, you could just ask the manufacturer. Of course that would be naive in the real world, since manufacturers and consumers have different interests. Most of the time we don't notice anything weird about this. A bit of competition is usually considered a good thing. But every now and then I have a WTF moment... Why are we working against each other? How much productivity do we loose through duplication of effort? Are the losses from this smaller or bigger than the gains from healthy competition? I have no great answer for that...
Oh and sorry for hijacking the comment area for a rant about the world and so on ;-).