#600: This Free Tool Decodes Game Boy ROM From a Photograph

Podcast: David Bombal · David Bombal

Opublikowano: 2026-09-02

Can you recover working software from a photograph of a microchip? Embedded systems reverse engineer Travis Goodspeed demonstrates how to extract the original Game Boy’s 256-byte boot ROM from a microscopic photograph of the mask ROM inside its CPU. The source image was created by combining 22 microscope photographs captured at 50x magnification. Using his free, open-source Mask ROM Tool, Travis marks 2,048 ROM bit locations, separates the ones from the zeros and checks for possible recognition errors. He then determines the logical order of the bits, disassembles the program and shows how it can be exported as a ROM file fo...