Saw this over on Ars Technica, a modder was able to dump the ROM of a Gameboy Advanced game by recording the sounds the system created when the game crashed.
Apparently those awful demonic noises generated by the system when the game crashes are the sounds of the system screaming out the data content of the cart! If you wait long enough you can actually hear the different samples used in the game’s audio as they’re stored raw.
The next time someone says to me “that security exploit is so obscure no one could ever use it in a practical application” I’ll be thinking of stuff like this. Nothing is too obscure for a nerd with time.