[Starscream]

If you're all about fishing, Legend of the Sea King for Gameboy leaked.

Too bad the related Legend of the River King 64 isn't here. http://web.archive.org/web/19990203005456/http://www.natsume.com/comingsoon/comingsoon.htm

Great. Never knew these were announced back then.

[MontyMole]

Looks like the Edd the Duck game is part of this mega leak. Can't think of a more niche title to base a game on to be honest, especially as I can remember it being previewed back in the day (Nintendo Zone or Total I think.)

[Baggins]

Someone just bumped this thread the other day:
https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=18383.0

It doesn't look like the colors are all that different from the default GB palette.

I'd have to include screen shots, but X japan, X japan fan tranlsation have a grey/blue theme for colors...

While X USA Proto/Lunar Crash demo default to default colors (sort of orange, green, yellow) on super gameboy for example... Yes it is the default pallete... and its boring... I'd like the japanese pallete back...

[Jorpho]

While X USA Proto/Lunar Crash demo default to default colors (sort of orange, green, yellow) on super gameboy for example... Yes it is the default pallete... and its boring... I'd like the japanese pallete back...

Oh, well, SGB palettes are completely different from GBC palettes. 

https://tcrf.net/Notes:Super_Game_Boy#Game_Boy_Internal_Name_Table suggests it looks at the internal ROM name.  It seems it just applies default palette 4-D, so hacking the ROM seems a little unnecessary.

[FAST6191]

I am not sure what round this technically is but we have another. Bunch of pokemon debug and beta stuff, some DS SDK stuff (there was a newer version in an older leak, not sure if this version is newer than the one that has been around for many years now) but for around here most will probably be interested in the famicom disk system "FDS Disk Writer" stuff. Not sure what it is exactly but given the surprisingly high interest level in the FDS around here then I will note it.

[Chronosplit]

More stuff I found in the game boy leak:

-Hammerin' Harry is a unique US version, this was Europe and Japan only.  It has a voice sample that appears to be in english!  Other than that it's Hammerin' Harry.
-Space Date is apparently an unreleased european version of Out of Gas
-Unfortunately the YuGiOh games are just Dark Duel Stories, but without the subtitle on the title screen for some reason.  Too bad.
-Edd the Duck actually... isn't terrible.  It comes from the Sonic school of platforming, no loops but you got speed.  Not amazing thanks to the screen real estate.
-Bobby's World was once a Home Alone game: https://tcrf.net/Bobby%27s_World_(Game_Boy) (Strange, this link goes to a completely different place when I place it in the post)
-ZAS is an european version, but heck if I can tell a difference between that and the Japanese one.  This is another game with that "wow" factor when it comes to graphics but for a SHMUP on the DMG.
-There are a few other european games slated to go to the US but never did, like Jimmy White's Cueball or David Beckham's Soccer.  I don't think there's much of a difference here since it was already in english.

[FAST6191]

Once more we find ourselves with leaked code to poke at with a stick

Pokemon 7th gen (that would be Sun and Moon, 2016 or so release date on the 3ds) being the most interesting this time around, though code only and assets are not there so presumably any builds will need to see those regenned, or you just use it to figure out how things operate.

Bunch of stuff as it pertains to Wii (and Wii aspects of Wii U) repair locations and mod detection, as well as some documents on the hardware (Broadway processor) and some other dev gear.

[Celice]

My favorite of the leaks so far has to be the 07/24/2020 leak. Lots of early assets, builds, tools, and code for a bunch of SNES games, and other cool stuff too.

I'm still finding cool and interesting aspects of the leak. Sadly a lot of the interest, and research, has died down, but there's a trove of things to discover still hiding out in this leak alone.

[Asaki]

I'd have to include screen shots, but X japan, X japan fan tranlsation have a grey/blue theme for colors...

While X USA Proto/Lunar Crash demo default to default colors (sort of orange, green, yellow) on super gameboy for example... Yes it is the default pallete... and its boring... I'd like the japanese pallete back...

You can probably just copy and paste the title from the Japanese header into the proto header.

[MysticLord]

Huge Capcom leak from ransomware hackers. Haven't looked into it too much but DMC2 and The Misadventures of Tron Bonne source code and master roms were leaked.

I think MML2 as well?

[SleepyFist]

MML2? I'd heard about the other two so far but not that one, fingers crossed for somebody to swoop in with MML ports sometime.

[Jorpho]

Yes indeed! I have a difficult time getting hyped over yet another release of Mario 64, but Tron Bonne, running conveniently under Windows with all the bells and whistles? That's something I can get behind!

[MysticLord]

Hoping and praying that Square Enix is next, and that they have source code for my favorites from the PS2 era and earlier.

Have any of the FPGA emulation communities said anything about the leaks? Could they possibly by damaged by them, legally?

I would love to have a RISC-V CPU/GPU handheld with a FPGA that can run everything from the N64/PS2 on down.

[FAST6191]

FPGA folks are still mostly messing around at the tail end of the 16 bit era, or with peripherals for later stuff (video adapters, controller adapters, expansion chip alternatives) from what I have seen. The future of it all is clear but cost-performance-difficulty do get in the way.
Damage wise then same as anything really -- if you can be shown to have used information obtained by illegitimate means (you copied their errors, their trap errors and obvious claims of using such things being the big three, some more minor stuff in maybe not handling undocumented features and possibly there being impossible feats that could only really be done by such things) then they can come down on you.
Likewise most FPGA folks are likely more interested in transistor diagrams for this sort of thing, which decapping is the better source for a lot of that ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWqBmmPQP40&t=1540s ), to say nothing of most old consoles tending to be off the shelf chips which 90s and older era game console companies probably did not have nice modern spice simulation setups and equivalents for.

I am unaware of any cases of this for this sort of thing, and we have examples they could probably ping going back decades now. People pumping out devices would be a potential turning point though (all well and good suing a hobby programmer, likely to cost more in lawyer fees than you are going to get back and unlikely to stop things you might not want).

[MysticLord]

I read an article recently (can't find it now) that the big thing in research labs outside of the first world and the Ivy League is 3d printed research tools.

https://hackaday.com/2015/01/13/cheap-diy-microscope-sees-individual-atoms/

https://hackaday.com/2019/01/26/3d-printed-microscope-stage-offers-precise-movement/

https://www.cleanroomtechnology.com/news/article_page/3Dprinted_tools_welcome/148155

What tools do decappers use? Other than their expertise and zeal, what's the bottleneck in getting chips decapped?

[FAST6191]

Varies considerably.

Classically they would tend to melt the housing of the chips off with some fairly unpleasant acids to reveal the chip and bond wires. Today there are some slightly nicer chemical means (though trickier) and some do it with abrasive methods*. If you happen to be able to find raw dies or it is one of those old school ones with a simple covering then fantastic.

*most of the ones I ever see in labs will be using metallography style sample prep machines (pregrinding machine for metallographic sample if you want a choice search term for a shopping search), which is not a terribly cheap hobby. However a surface plate and fine ruby sanding/lapping/grinding paper or something similar might get it done.

Microscopes (optical in some cases, scanning electron microscope aka SEM in others).

From there you grind down layer by layer (some chips are single layer, others not so much, sometimes there are also security measures but that is usually a thing for those also doing electrical analysis) making a complete image as they go (stitching it a lot and possibly sorting things if your grinding reveals multiple layers at once)

There was a nice talk on it at C3 a few years back (think between 24c3 and 27c3) but I could not find it last night when making that reply. It covered how it became possible to do it outside high end electronics research labs (be it university or big chip maker) and a few searches on it say it has got a bit better still.

So yeah unpleasant chemicals, tooling investment, microscopy, time to stitch things together (though software can help) and it almost always necessarily being a destructive process for what might well be rare, expensive and hard to come by samples*, possibly multiple at that.

*it is one thing to put your fun stuff money into buying say a neo geo and attaching scope probes to it, maybe soldering a few wires and then doing a bunch of tests, either to keep or sell on when done for as much or maybe more than you paid for it, quite another to basically destroy it.

[MysticLord]

Very cool info, thanks for entertaining my tangent.