ZZAZZGlitch has successfully reverse-engineered a Game Boy Advance game’s data solely from the sound made when a GBA game experiences a hard crash. The per-game crash ‘songs’ that happen when a GBA game crashes actually contains the entire cartridge’s ROM data and every sound in the game played back in raw audio in sequential order. In theory, with the correct tools and know-how, any GBA game should be recoverable from recording that audio.

ZZAZZGlitch shows us how in his video. Wow. He even made the source code is available on his personal site, labeled “gbacrashsound_dumper.zip”. It still took a LOT of hacking and manual fix-ups; but he got a bootable game in the end.

Reminds me of the guy that tried to reconstruct the Yars Revenge source from the explosions shown onscreen.