Back in September we ran a news item about the reverse engineering of the 6502 microprocessor using acid, graphics and JavaScript. Now we have a video update on the whole wonderful, but slightly crazy, project.

OK I admit it isn't actually a movie but is instead an hour-long talk broken down into 10 minute segments. The subject matter is how to reverse engineer a 6502 microprocessor using acid, graphics and transistor level simulation. We covered the basic idea back in September 2010 (see Transistor level 6502 simulation)   and the video is basically a presentation of the same ideas with an update.

In case you missed the earlier news item, what happens is that the group take the top off a chip, eat away at it with acid and then photograph the layers that are revealed. From the photographs they then create a drawing that is essentially a map of the chip and from this they can identify transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors and interconnections. The graphic serves as the basic input to a simulator written in JavaScript which can take programs and run them as if it was the native hardware - only slower of course.

The video presentations are fairly technical and go into a lot of detail about the 6502 and assembly language but if you are a hardware oriented sort of guy its a lot of fun.

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More Information

Transistor level 6502 simulation