> Some of the reverse engineering tricks utilized by DiscoStarslayer include chemically decapping the CXP102064 to expose the die, then using microscopes and optical dumping skills to analyze the silicon chip circuitry. In this case, a lucky break during the hacking apparently uncovered an exploit that provided a method whereby the chip’s data could be extracted through software.

This is next level commitment to the cause.

Also, I can totally imagine their reaction when they discovered the exploit and realized they could put down the ... chemicals. XD

There actually is a pretty large community of hardware reverse engineers decapping chips for fun, sometimes just to dump internal ROMs (like in this case) and other times going as far as to try reconstructing the original schematics and netlists in order to document the chip's internals and allow for more accurate emulation, in some cases all the way down to the transistor level [1] [2]. If you want to learn more, Ken Shirriff has written a lot of blog posts on the subject [3] and Siliconprawn [4] hosts a huge collection of die shots from many contributors.

[1] https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix

[2] https://github.com/iaddis/metalnes

[3] https://www.righto.com/

[4] https://siliconprawn.org/

Byuu and McMaster decapped all the SNES ones with amazing write-ups a number of years ago.