Modder TheZZAZZGlitch has discovered that it's possible to dump and recreate a GBA ROM by crashing the game and recording the sound that plays after an hour and a half.
While that makes it sound like an easy process, actually getting the ROM recreated and working took TheZZAZZGlitch quite a lot of time – and they had to cook up special hardware to do it.
Even so, by taking multiple recordings and tinkering with the code, the modder could eventually get a successful, accurate dump of the game data and boot it up.
"Turns out, the GBA crash sound is just the console playing its entire address space as sound data," they explain. "If we have a clear recording, we can convert it back to actual bytes, thus dumping the RAM and ROM. Note - this is hardly a ready-to-use solution and requires a lot of tuning, depending on the source data format."
You learn something new every day.
[source youtube.com]
Comments 19
Wow, that was out of left field.
I wonder how long this poor soul listened to GBA crash sounds before figuring this out?
That's so cyberpunk it could have been taken from an early draft by William Gibson.
Hey, it's Audacity! I just used that a couple days ago to trim down some audio I ripped from my DVD of the Chuck Norris classic "The Hitman".
That's pretty awesome. I'll stick with the GBA Link Cable to Wii for dumping purposes, but I'm astounded someone was dedicated enough to figure this out.
It’s like its brain is leaking out of its ears or something, gnarly.
Amazingly, making use of sound recordings to dump ROMs is not a new concept.
My brother has made use of this to make a dump of the Limited Run Games release of Shantae on GBC, though it's through the use of a homebrew tool booted via flashcart to load something into memory first.
The revelation that the "cartridge yank" audio is actually a memory dump and not just random jarring noise though?? That's amazing!
Nintendo no doubt implemented that for debugging purposes.
Makes me think there are some messages hidden in the snow on air TV when there's no signal...
The first part sounds pretty bad but the later part sounds nice
I thought this was going to be a new find from shonumi.github.io when I started. That guy has found everything!
I guess this is a little bit like how audiocassette drives worked for older microcomputers like the Commodore 64
I haven't watched the video, but I'd have thought that half of the challenge would be to get the game to crash in the first place. Do you need to come up with a custom solution for that for each individual game? Or is there some well known hardware-level trick which works for everything?
@RupeeClock In the 80s, game data was broadcast over the radio for people to record on cassette and play on micros with tape drives. Well, maybe. My 6th form Computing teacher told my class this and I'm still not sure whether he was saying it actually happened or was theoretical.
@TransmitHim
It's conceivable due to the way that many British home computers like the ZX Spectrum distributed games on audio cassettes, with the program data being encoded as audio.
Distributing program code over radio would be highly unreliable though due to probable distortion.
I think i will stay with my Retrode
Isn’t that how old computer tape deck games were dumped?
It's the GBA game screaming its very soul out.
@TransmitHim It was a real thing. Here is a clip from a BBC show in 1983 where they talk about downloading software OTA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtTVczVmV8w&t
I had the opposite issue with OutRun on C64. I could never get the tape to load until I finally figured out the version someone gave me (for free), was actually a tape of the arcade soundtrack! The US Gold version came with two tapes and I only had the one.
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...