Stupid question maybe, but how do people dump cart ROMs?

[noiseredux]

I'm just kind of curious about this and never really knew. Obviously in the case of a CD-based game, you stick the CD in the computer and rip away. But how did people take like a GBA cart and get the ROM onto their computer? Was it a flash linker that did this?

I'm just curious about the devices or methods that people used to turn NES, GB, SNES, TG16, SMS, Gen, etc carts into digital files. I had never really thought about it before.

[swiftzx]

It was the rom fairy. If you're good enough, when you wake up in the morning, you'll find Super Mario Bros rom in your pc

[toadhall]

I know the SNES had copiers like these.

I imagine other consoles have similar copiers made for them.

You can rip any DS game with a flashcart and the proper homebrew software and I think you can do it with GBA games this way too. No idea how they did it before DS flashcarts though. Probably a flash linker of some kind.

EDIT: lol! just found this link where someone dumped the rom of the game copier itself!

[Anapan]

Yup, flasher devices are/were used (they exist for almost all cart based videogame systems). Before those existed, the IC chips were either desoldered and put into an eeprom programmer/reader or someone who knew exactly what they were doing built hardware and software to extract the information from the cart via the pins. Most rom images have a header that tells the emulator where each IC starts and ends, and the rest of the data is just binary coppied together into one file. I remember the first NES emulators had separate files for character, program and something else. Same with mame roms, they're zip files or directories with files named after the numbers on the micro chips.
There's some really cheap and capable USB devices that make the job much easier that it used to be.
http://openschemes.com/2010/04/29/turni ... est-bench/
When emulation was just starting people often built their own rom dumping devices and sometimes just guessed at how much data was in the cart. That's why there's lot of roms marked Bad and Overdump and the first emulated systems have many different formats for the rom images.
Look what Costis did to dump the Gameboy Color's Bios
http://www.fpgb.org/?page_id=17

[Ziggy]

For most carts, the game data is all on one chip. It's just a matter of dumping that chip, which is for all intents and purposes, the same as reading a CD. Most NES carts have two ROM chips, and arcade boards have many ROM chips (like Anapan mentioned) but it's still just a matter of reading the chips.

Copiers for most carts are pretty easy to get a hold of these days. Though unless you need to dump your own ROMs for some specific reason, it's much easier just to download them these days since they can be found so easily. That is, until you stumble upon an ultra rare cart that's never been dumped before.