Progress January I - Metal spaghetti (Patreon)

The high-resolution die picture of LSPC (the NeoGeo video controller chip) is here !

John McMaster submitted it to his website siliconpr0n.org just a few days after receiving the envelope from France, right between Christmas and new year's eve.

I've wondered for years (no joke) if it was possible to figure out everything by just looking inside and it turns out to be !
Coïncidentally, ArcadeHacker just wrote a blog post about a CPS2 chip of a very similar series: https://arcadehacker.blogspot.fr/2018/01/a-journey-into-capcoms-cps2-silicon.html

Simply put, now that the 800MPixels picture exists, it's "just" a matter of following thousands of metal traces and guessing which cell is which thanks to a 1991 Fujitsu databook which by luck happens to float around the internet.

Figuring out the logic now is much more a matter of inference than taking semi-blind guesses and having to start over many times.

This is tedious and it will take a while as you can see on the picture (white zones and black rectangles are the cells I identified in ~20 hours), but I sure am EXCITED !