A Disassembler for ROM Recovery

Travis Goodspeed

REcon 2025 · Day 3 · Main Track

Mask ROM recovery — photographing a chip's die, identifying row and column lines, and reading out the physical bit array — gives you the bits in physical order. Getting from physical bits to executabl

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Goodspeed builds a bidirectional assembler/disassembler from a single instruction definition set that scores candidate ROM decodings for validity, applies it to the Game Boy, the Clipper chip, and smart card opcode scrambling, and makes the entire mask ROM recovery pipeline tractable — this is exactly what REcon exists for.

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