Where did this long, drawn out argument about Vectrex stuff come from? I check back and there's like 50 new posts that don't even seem to be worth reading anymore.

Quote Originally Posted by bunnyboy View Post
Eventually all the NWCs, all protos, all repros, and almost all NES unlicensed games will be dead. How they are cared for makes little difference. Unless the carts are regularly dumped and verified nobody knows how many are already losing data.
How does bit rot apply to Unliscensed games? I have a fair collection of unliscensed games, and I have opened up quite a few of them. I didn't specifically notice any that contained EP-ROMS with little windows on the chips like the protos/ NWC carts did. I'd have to check, but I don't recall seeing epoxy circles on the chips either (I haven't reopened them recently though), a tell-tale sign that it contains an sealed EP-ROM instead of PROM. I believe most of the homebrewers and repros also used write-once PROMS as well. How will these suffer from "bit-rot" when the data is "burned in" permanently?

I guess in the grand scheme of time, any EPROMS, whether epoxied or not, will eventually succumb to partial bit erasures due to background radiation. I am curious, whether or not it is possible to recover an unreadable bit-rotted EPROM using forensics? For example, suppose an EPROM that has suffered bit-rot has only partially erased bits on it. If someone used a logic analyser to measure the output voltage on the pins for every single bit of the ROM, suppose a partially erased bit has an output voltage of 4V, but a bit that originally was recorded as a "1" and never was burned, is still 5.0V. They would all show up as logic "1" on any digital TTL circuit, but by recording the analog voltage output of every bit, the results would likely be lower on the "rotted" bits than on the original logic 1s. It would be a painstackingly slow process to read a ROM chip in this manner, but a lot of curropted data could likely be fully recovered.

Forensic scientists have successfully recovered even professionally "wiped" hard drives, because a "1" overwritten by a "1" will be stronger than a "0" overwritten by a "1" and visa-versa, so a even a drive that has been wiped using software, with every bit erased, may still have extremely weak traces of data left on them, though extracting it would be incredibly expensive and time-consuming.