Reverse engineering ME2’s USB with a heat gun and a knife

Background

A tiny 2008 handheld called ME2 has resurfaced in the retro-hackosphere after a video from bjiru surfaced showing the missing online client. The toy’s gimmick was simple and charming: sync points and gems to an online world via USB. The game was niche and poorly archived, so when the client reappeared it sparked a familiar itch in preservationists — who doesn’t want to rescue a little piece of digital childhood? It has been reported that members of the Miuchiz Reborn project, which has been preserving similar handheld-and-server ecosystems since 2015, picked up the trail and bought a handful of ME2 units from eBay to get hands-on.

Teardown and what was found

Software for the device appears lost. The handheld enumerates as removable storage, but the contents merely point users to download the long-gone online game; the supposed desktop sync app — allegedly called “ME2 Desktop Buddy” — hasn’t been archived anywhere. So the only option was hardware surgery. It has been reported that a heat gun and a knife were used to remove the epoxy blob covering the main microcontroller — not delicate work. Under the hood the main firmware sits on an SST39VF3201 flash chip; the microcontroller itself is a chip‑on‑board (CoB) under a glob of epoxy, which hides any identifying marks and possibly an internal ROM that could hold the USB protocol.

The practical next step was straightforward and old-school: desolder the flash, read it with an off‑the‑shelf programmer (XGecu and the like), and begin reverse engineering the dumped firmware to recreate the sync protocol. The GitHub writeup linked from the Hacker News thread documents that process and the trade-offs: you can get the flash contents without identifying the silicon under the epoxy, but recovering any ROM inside the sealed microcontroller is harder — and may require riskier decapsulation. For preservationists and tinkerers this is exactly the kind of messy, hopeful work that keeps abandoned ecosystems from vanishing. Who knew a heat gun and a knife could become archival tools?

Sources: github.com/coremaze, Hacker News