37C3 - Reconstructing game footage from a Game Boy's memory bus

Reconstruct game footage from a Game Boy's memory bus by plugging into its memory bus, decoding CPU instructions and converting to a lossless format using a state machine and compression techniques.

Key takeaways

The talk is about reconstructing game footage from a Game Boy’s memory bus.
The technique involves plugging into the Game Boy’s memory bus and reading the data bus, then decoding the instructions to recreate the game.
The Game Boy’s memory bus is a shared bus between the cartridge and internal RAM.
The GPU interceptor is a project that can capture Game Boy footage and convert it to a lossless format.
The GPU interceptor uses a state machine to observe the CPU instructions and recreate the game.
The talk covers the following topics:
- The Game Boy’s memory bus and how it works
- The GPU interceptor project and how it works
- How to use the GPU interceptor to capture Game Boy footage
- How to encode the captured footage to a lossless format
- How to use the GPU interceptor to create a cartridge module that acts as a USB video
The talk also covers some of the technical details of the process, including the use of discrete cosine transform (DCT) and quantization to compress the data.
The talk mentions that not all games will work with the GPU interceptor, but some games can be fixed with specific patches.
The talk ends with a compatibility chart showing which games work with the GPU interceptor.

37C3 - Reconstructing game footage from a Game Boy's memory bus

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