Short Summary

We document classic arcade cabinets, terminals, synthesizers, keyboards and more.  We have special training and equipment to physically process these systems in order to understand how they were built.

In the short time we had the chips we've preserved a series of chips including HD647180 (ex: Fire Shark), 8751 (ex: Tatakae Big Fighter), PICs (ex: Ultimate Mortal Combat), and more.

As you may be aware from similar projects, decapping is capital intensive.  Not only is equipment expensive (ex: microscope), but most work incurs costs like chemicals and special hardware.  So far everything has come out of pocket.

What We Need & What You Get

We are currently planning Q1 2017.  We'd like to break even and secure funds to continue processing chips.  For reference, as of 2016-01-08 we've spent over $2500 of our own funds on chips already processed and in the pipeline.  This doesn't count the time we put into this project and also ignores equipment we already had.  Expenses include things like:

• Equipment
• Practice samples
• Custom PCBs
• Consumables like acid, acetone, gloves, etc

By supporting this project you allow us to continue delivering blog posts.  We'll also post high resolution chip pictures but won't be able to provide additional content beyond that.

In line with the Q1 plan we've posted perks to cover the next 2-3 months of work.  See perks for details.

For the time being we are focusing on the original sample lot.  If you are contributing hoping to see work outside of that, please contact us before contributing.

Finally, funds will likely get treated as personal taxable income for us.  We will try to deduct if possible, but actually breaking even may mean a premium on top of actual expenses.

The Impact

More funding means we can process more chips faster.  For example, purchasing an off the shelf adapter instead of building our own.  Adequate funding allows us to acquire better equipment to more reliably process rare chips.  Even if funding is below target we'll continue to process chips, but it may limit what we can do.

Case study: #45 "Tatakae Big Fighter".  We'd recommend either sending this out for bonding or purchasing a bonding machine.  But, since funds were not available, we did a grueling repair procedure.  Aside that we don't really want to do that again, this took a lot of time away from processing other chips.

Risks & Challenges

Health risks aside, decapping doesn't always work.  We've been very upfront and transparent about this.  For example, a damaged EPROM chip is very difficult to read out.  We make a best effort to deal with such situations, but still need to cover costs when such issues occur.

For example, some of the PICs don't have valid data on them.  The dump wasn't 100% successful, but we did what we reasonably could to get that dump.  However, we still need to cover our costs getting to that point.

Other Ways You Can Help

Can't contribute financially?  We will also be looking to the community for help acquiring samples.  Stay tuned for more info.