To reverse engineer a 33-year-old video game chip John McMaster got a microscope off craigslist, motor controllers out of university dumpster, and a laptop from a surplus shop. He used an arm chip and some python to control the motors and take photos. Then he put on a hazmat suit and delayered the chip with ammonium fluoride, a temperature controlled heat gun, and a vortexer. Then he dash etched with HNO3 and HF to get the bits to show up on the microscope. Then MarshallH wrote a bunch of C# to pull the bits off the images. It turns out that it's not all that difficult to understand. It's just security through obscurity. Pull the authentication stream. Might as well write your own implementation while you're at it. This challenge has a non-standard flag format, the first 5 letters are f149{.