> I believe what is needed is for the board to be sent off to someone who will remove > the chips, take the top off the chips and read out the program contained inside. > Unless I am mistaken, its a destructive process with no way to restore the board to > "working" state afterwards.
correct
in this case it's a mask part, with no known electronic readout, so it will be done with images of the die, and the 'typing monkeys' project.
but yes, once it's been decapped it's not really going to be usable anymore, and since they're not programmable parts you're not going to be able to repair a board with a replacement chip reprogrammed using the extracted data.
it essentially requires the sacrifice of a board.
I think the best anybody can hope for in terms of real hardware repairs is probably somebody using the extracted code to make some kind of fpga solution that works in the same way as the original chip but that's a task completely outside the scope of MAME.
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