MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: DU: Final Ketchup

> > > likely the type of thing Peter could hack too if we want to keep it within
> Europe.
> >
> > There are also US versions released under the "Talking Whiz-Kid" brand, which
> likely
> > do share internal MCU code with the corresponding "Genius Junior" and "Genius
> Leader"
> > German versions. (Probably not coincidentally, the first four bytes of the external
> > ROM dumps of Genius Junior Movie and Genius Junior Redstar happen to be the letters
> > NTWK.)
>
> I still have the Vtech Pitagorín Jr. of my daughter, but it's located at Buenos
> Aires.
> I'll try to manage if someone can send it to Europe.
>
> Are you sure Peter can deal with the internal blob?
> Otherwise should be sent to the Sean domains.
>
> Robbie.

If there's a cartridge slot, and it can run code that has access to internal ROM then it's the type of thing where we can trojan it out. A cartridge dump is vital tho, as Peter's technique involves faking a known device being connected and modifying the code with an FPGA in realtime. If not, things are much more difficult.

Sean's methods in such cases are instead more 'electronic' rather than software hacking and work on the assumption that the cartridge slot can see the full bus, including internal ROM. This is actually somewhat less likely on internal ROM setups than 'glob BIOS ROM' setups.

There's no guarantee anybody anybody can do it mind you, but both techniques are different and one may work better in a given situation than the other.