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/

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darkfloo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Doesn’t decapping chips require hydrofluoric acid ? If so I cannot express enough respect, the one person I’ve interacted with that regularly worked with it put the fear of god with by showing what one insignificant miss for anything else did to his finger

	▲	monocasa 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, the default acid used is nitric acid. Which should definitely be treated with respect, but isn't nearly as nasty as anything with fluorine. But if you have a few examples of the chip and can break a few eggs to make an omelette, there are techniques that just involve hitting the epoxy with a blow torch and/or opening it up with plyers.