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> you carefully dump acid on them, and you visually extract the ROM data.

Super interested in how that works. Do they literally map out the chip at a transistor/gate level?

Yup check out https://hackaday.com/2017/05/02/how-to-reverse-engineer-a-ch... and Ken Shirriff's excellent blog http://www.righto.com/search/label/reverse-engineering

Check out this talk by Chris Gerlinsky at 33c3 (2016)[1] about how he went about cracking the encryption of cable/satellite television set-top boxes. It is a very detailed talk, and he goes into detail about delaminating a ROM chip and visually extracting the contents of its memory bit-by-bit using a microscope and then software to speed things up a little. It's a long talk so he goes into more detail about the rest of the process, but I really enjoyed it.

[1] https://youtu.be/lhbSD1Jba0Q

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