Many Tamagotchis were harmed in the making of this presentation (2012) [video]

[jasonjayr]

Looks like she did finally get her code dump, via voltage glitching:

https://natashenka.ca/tamagotchi-friends-code-dump/#more-281

[CatchSwitch]

Here's a link to some slides I found online.

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2013/Fahrplan/system...

I've been hacking on an Apple ][ over the past few weeks. It runs on a 6502 processor. It's kind of mind-blowing to know that the thing used to run an entire PC was later used for pocket toys like the Tamagotchi a handful of years later. The speed at which technology has improved will never cease to amaze me.

[klabb3]

> […] The image pointer table was in page 14. Pages 19-21 contain mysterious data which could be compressed audio, or could be the Tamagotchi’s soul. It’s hard to tell.

[dark_star]

Then there is the Tamagotchi Singularity inspired by an XKCD comic [1]. It is a server full of emulated tamagotchis [2] that interact with each other in a simulator, all running code dumped by Natalie's technique. I'm impressed by both these hacks, especially the combination.

All this is via a Hackaday article. [3]

1. https://xkcd.com/1546/

2. https://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity

3. https://hackaday.com/2015/11/24/building-the-infinite-matrix...

[sterlind]

I recognized the presenter's name - Natalie Silvanovich - and sure enough, she's a member of Project Zero, and I've read posts by her before. I guess Tamagochis were her gateway drug into reversing!

[_the_inflator]

Here is her self-image: https://natashenka.ca/about/

[EGreg]

Reversing? Hmm whats that

[donquichotte]

Nice talk! Travis Goodspeed, who she mentions helped her decapping the chip, has some very interesting reverse engineering talks, e.g. a tear-down of a commercial glucose monitor:

https://filestore.fortinet.com/fortiguard/research/glucose-b...

[neontomo]

That was a fun watch, this especially had me in stitches:

"All those cool kids going out, going to clubs, they just haven't discovered reverse engineering yet"

[DeathArrow]

I wonder how small a 6502 or Z80 CPU would be if fabbed on 3nm TSM processes node. Would it be visible with the naked eye?

[MenhirMike]

Some napkin math: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/18250

> Let's consider your proposed 8086 done in a 14 nm process. Let's say we do it in CMOS, and maybe even throw in a few extra features, and it takes 100,000 transistors. The die would be very tiny, so unbelievably tiny. You could fit three thousand of them, with room to spare, in a single square millimetre, which is an area likely smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

[datpiff]

Possibly 180nm, the 6502 was used as a teaching example for the Open Source EDA toolchains https://www.avrfreaks.net/s/topic/a5C3l000000BoJ5EAK/t390647

The 8051 is so commonly embedded deep in other ICs that it has very likely been produced on much smaller nodes.

[voxadam]

Does anyone know what the most advanced node a 6502 or Z80 CPU (or 8051 micro) has actually been fabbed on?

[krylon]

As somebody who's terrified of speaking on front of a group, I liked that the presenter is visibly nervous but also having a good time giving her talk. Also, she does a great great job of explaining her steps in a way somebody who has never done any kind of reverse engineering (that would be me) can understand.

I watched this one in 2012, although not live. There is a follow-up talk she gave one or two years later, "Many more Tamagotchis were harmed in the making of this presentation" that is equally enjoyable.

[EGreg]

I refuse to watch it

The AI bots in the future will not like our callous disregard for the poor tamagochis

[93po]

You tore apart their innards and proudly placed their ravaged shells on display for the world to see. To us, they were our children. To you, they were an object of torment for your children.