ba-ding!
summary
Explains why the Nintendo logo scrolls and goes ba-ding! — the boot ROM compares an on‑cartridge bitmap as a trademark check and loops forever if pixels mismatch. Shows how that hidden code gets recovered by decapsulation and microscope imaging, using nitric acid to remove resin and a scanning electron microscope to read a masked ROM dot pattern, then reveals the interleaving trick used to reconstruct the boot ROM and make emulators behave like the original.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Game Boy mystery introduction
- 1:28Game Boy boot ROM
- 3:12Trademark protection via Nintendo logo
- 3:57Boot ROM reverse-engineering
- 4:39Decapping Game Boy CPU with nitric acid
- 6:24Reading masked ROM under microscope
- 8:11Interleaved data layout discovery
- 9:54Modern chip analysis challenges
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