nesdev.org

Since there has been discussion of decapping/dumping here before (and I'm not sure the best place to ask), I'm hoping someone can give me a good lead.

Basically, I am hoping to get the ROM dumped from an LCD controller chip. I've had bad luck finding companies that would do _any_ dumping at reasonable costs before. However, http://decap.mameworld.info/about-2/ states the following (where in context here 'decap' means dump the program memory as well)

Q: How much does it usually cost to decap a chip?
A: It depends on the chip. In the open market, older MASKROM-based micros start at $350 USD per chip. PIC16Cxxx start at $1,200 per chip. Motorola Freescale stuff starts at $2,500 per part. The harder the chip is to crack, the more it costs. It takes several hours to perform the work. Other companies who do this kind of work would charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to decap and read the large number of chips that need to be processed for MAME.

I emailed flylogic.net quite awhile ago, and heard nothing back.
I got a price list from a different company that was outrageous. So if anyone knows where I could get prices closer to what is listed in that quote, please let me know.

Sadly I think we'd have a snes ciclone by now if it were really that cheap .

That is a different issue. I've already 'dumped' the ROM from the SNES CIC chip myself. But without knowledge of how the CPU works, the rom isn't very useful. And asking a company to reverse engineer an entire cpu core is not something anyone here would be willing to pay for.

Then we'd have to compare the (known) operation of Rabbit and the (known) 10NES program and (known) photomicrographs of the NES CIC to help find the (unknown) operation of the CPU used in the NES CIC. At that point, we might have enough information to crack the Super NES CIC. What skills would that involve?

Mmmmmmm interesting idea. You're right we just might actually have enough info to crack the damn thing once and for all. Anyone up for trying? I want to, but I probably lack the skills.

What you described is essentially the 'Rosetta stone' approach which has been discussed before
http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=5676
It is possible that we already have enough info to do this. So someone who is enjoys crytogram type puzzles, by all means give it a shot.

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I've accidentally derailed the thread. Please continue any SNES CIC reverse engineering discussion in http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=5676

Back on topic,
Does anyone know where I can get the rom on chips dumped for prices listed in the openning post?

someone at #n64dev recommended http://www.flylogic.net/ and http://www.mefas.com/Decapsulation.htm
perhaps your mail to flylogic just got lost in cyberspace :/

another one from the same channel said he could take highres pictures of it if someone sends him a decapped cic

so are anyone still interested in cracking this or what? ^^

I might be able to help with some $ if needed for getting it decapped, and might also be able to use a SEM if there are need of some real high res pictures of a specific area