Martin Donlon aka Wickerwaka has uploaded a few videos that highlight some of the arcade bard reverse engineering he’s been doing. The first video showcased an 8-bit ROM emulator in a DIP-32 compatible form factor he’s calling PicoROM. It’s main use case is for rapid iteration when experimenting with arcade hardware. It can emulate ROMs up to 2MBit (256Kbytes) in size and speeds of 100ns. Martin also released a continuation of that video, that uses PicoROM, as well as a logic analyzer to test how the GA25 graphics processor access memory and how is that memory shared with the processor. More info below:
PicoROM: https://github.com/wickerwaka/PicoROM
Follow Martin: https://x.com/wickerwaka
While these videos aren’t really for the average retro gamer, I think anyone working on reverse engineering video game hardware should give them both a watch. The goal is to allow for more accurate FPGA hardware emulation, however I think anyone even remotely curious on how reverse engineering works would be interested as well.
If you’d like to hear more from Martin, please check out an interview we did – Either watch the video at the bottom of this page, or search any podcast app for “RetroRGB Wickerwaka”:
