alt Hacker NewsIt’s not that hard to reverse engineer anything you know about. You know, there is FPGA, there is PCIe, FPGA model is also known. All externals interfaces are also known. High probability, that the board is not broken.
Imagine obscure motherboard, produced 25-30 years ago. No current colleague has seen it before. Half designed internally, other half circuits licensed. All the ICs met very aggressive thermal glue and their names are gone. The client is to ready to pay anything for the repair. They sent you crate full of broken boards. That’s where real reverse engineering starts.
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real reverse engineering: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1717609925-20240605.png
Any idea how much a service like that actually costs? Say I had an old camera, how much would reversed engineering the CCD drive circuit cost?
Or imagine a Drake R8A receiver, described as "guaranteed NOT to work" that a friend picked up. It can be tricked into working, but it gives a "PWRLOS" display most of the time, and there is no discernable cause. Thanks to the obscure NEC uPD78213 cpu actually being available and documented, and having no internal rom... it's time to write a disassembler[1] (or later find out that MAME has one[2] thats pretty good), look at all the schematics, and figure out how the firmware works.
*Still working on the disassembler, because I can eventually make mine interactive, add labels, comments, etc.
[1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Res78213
[2] https://docs.mamedev.org/debugger/memory.html#debugger-comma...