Presented at
44CON 2016,
Unknown date/time
(Unknown duration).
In this talk we'll follow a project of mine to take an old VTech computer from the late 1980s, upon which I wrote my very first line of code, and add save functionality to its hardware. The computer was designed to teach kids general knowledge, science, history, typing skills, and programming in BASIC. It boasts a one-line text based LCD display, 2KB of SRAM, and a Z80 processor. The one thing that always bothered me, though, is that I couldn't ever save code I wrote on it - turning it off meant all state was lost.
I'll describe my approach towards reverse engineering the circuitry, identifying the ICs, understanding the system topology, designing a hardware mod to allow saving of data, and fabrication of the real thing.
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