Chances are he didn't. Verified dumps are all over the internet.
However, a sufficiently motivated individual can create cartridge dumpers with hardware like Arduino and a broken Game Boy (to harvest the socket for convenience). The cartridges for most/all game systems are widely understood by this point thanks to the efforts of reverse engineers.
Of course there are also pre-built dumpers available through various sources. They are not unique to the present-day. Even when the SNES and Game Boy were still selling on shelves, there were devices created specifically for copying cartridges to alternative storage such as floppy disk or custom cartridges.
Why not? Learning how things used to be done is interesting. With reverse engineering in particular, it feels a little like software archaeology and being the first one to see something in decades.
Objectively, it's probably not worth the time, unless you do a lot of embedded programming. Subjectively, there's no accounting for taste.
I was really pleased with the vgrep technique he used at the start to figure out what changed the map data. I often forget just how awesome our eyes are at spotting changing stuff at a glance and small datasets don't take long to manually look at.
Simply open the working RAM and look at it; lo and behold the thing is right there.
(There's some super spiffy things built on this idea, the one I was really excited to see come out was ..cantor.dust.. [0], which was never released.)
Now we reverse engineer the reverse engineering tool and create an open source version that can hook into /proc/mem and other streams instead of just files :)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] threadHowever, a sufficiently motivated individual can create cartridge dumpers with hardware like Arduino and a broken Game Boy (to harvest the socket for convenience). The cartridges for most/all game systems are widely understood by this point thanks to the efforts of reverse engineers.
Of course there are also pre-built dumpers available through various sources. They are not unique to the present-day. Even when the SNES and Game Boy were still selling on shelves, there were devices created specifically for copying cartridges to alternative storage such as floppy disk or custom cartridges.
Has some screenshots too.
http://lf94.github.io/kdl2viewer/
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noun: rundown; plural noun: rundowns; noun: run-down; plural noun: run-downs
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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300075
Objectively, it's probably not worth the time, unless you do a lot of embedded programming. Subjectively, there's no accounting for taste.
I have that game, always loved playing that game, and am surprised to know it's now worth at least $80!
Simply open the working RAM and look at it; lo and behold the thing is right there.
(There's some super spiffy things built on this idea, the one I was really excited to see come out was ..cantor.dust.. [0], which was never released.)
[0] https://sites.google.com/site/xxcantorxdustxx/
EDIT: formatting
I can't tell if this is a joke, or 100% serious. I'm trying to find a download link because damn this looks cool. Thanks for sharing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/1izity/...