Arstechnica article on accurate emulation

[Ziggy]

Very nice read. I'm gonna go download bSNES! I thought this part was very interesting...

LLE is also a very expensive operation, monetarily speaking: to obtain the DSP program code requires melting the integrated circuit with nitric acid, scanning in the surface of a chip with an electron microscope, and then either staining and manually reading out or physically altering and monitoring the traces to extract the program and data ROMs. This kind of work can cost up to millions of dollars to have done professionally, depending upon the chip's complexity, due to the extremely specialized knowledge and equipment involved. Thanks to the efforts of an individual who goes by the name "Dr. Decapitator," we've been able to extract this data from nearly a dozen chips for just the cost of materials.

Disk rot? Carts I'm not too worried about. Even some really dirty ones I acquired from a friend sevin0seven showed me how to clean up nicely to get them to work again. But disk rot is something you can't repair...

There's bit rot, which can occur in carts. I actually just repaired a cart of Seven's, the mask ROM went bad (either bit rot or it got shocked or something). Though it was a Majesco cart, and I'm convinced it wasn't a mask ROM but actually a OTP EPROM. They would have sold their first borns to save money on producing those carts, so I'm sure they used really really cheap EPROMs and programmed them in bulk. Anyway... You're carts aren't as safe as you think! But the good news is, they're fixable compared to discs. You can saw a SNES cart almost in half and still be able to fix it if you're so inclined. Try fixing a disc that's been sawed almost in half.

[AppleQueso]

Disc Rot is relatively rare anyhow.

Anyone have any statistics? I thought it was quite common with certain manufacturers/games from certain systems.

I'm not even sure 'quite common' was accurate, just 'more common'.

[Hatta]

Silicon ICs have a limited shelf life due to electromigration. You don't really have to worry about it for 100 years or so, but it's good this kind of work is being done now. By the time all our consoles really die maybe we will have transistor level emulation of these things.

[flamepanther]

Silicon ICs have a limited shelf life due to electromigration. You don't really have to worry about it for 100 years or so, but it's good this kind of work is being done now. By the time all our consoles really die maybe we will have transistor level emulation of these things.

By then our resources will be so poor that it won't matter if such an accurate emulator runs a bit slow, either

[DinnerX]

I suspect there will be chip repair sets when the time comes. We already have clone systems so maybe someday someone will care enough to make accurate clone chips for repairing original consoles.

[Ziggy]

^ You mean like actual SNES CPU's and PPU's and that sort of thing?

[Hobie-wan]

Disc Rot is relatively rare anyhow.

Anyone have any statistics? I thought it was quite common with certain manufacturers/games from certain systems.

There was a European audio CD maker that had lots of issues in the early 90s, but most disc rot due to manufacturing issues is rare. I think that most 'disc rot' and pinholes that people freak out about is due to people putting discs down on tables, dropping them on the floor, or general mishandling. If a hole is scratched through to the aluminum, it will oxidise because the air is getting, which is what disc rot really is.