This is something I've come to care about in the past year as I've gotten more interested in hardware.
I did some research into the Dr Decapitator saga previously and found some Reddit threads about it. Here, byuu thinks this kind of work runs in the 5-figures and up:
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comm ... eir_chips/
I raised $2500 and paid the guy to decap and dump ten chips for us. He dumped eight of them (DSP-1/1A/1B/2/3/4+ST-010/011), and had started work on the other two (Cx4 + ST-018) and had already provided die scans. He probably put in around 300 hours of work for us on equipment that costs millions of dollars (and no, I am definitely not exaggerating here.)
We ended up finding software ways to extract the last two, so we decided to end the decapping efforts there. I could not possibly be more happy with the services he rendered. We have since been able to emulate all of these chips' original microprocessors, achieving near-perfect emulation of all of them. I was able to replace about 800KB of buggy HLE code with around 60KB of LLE code, and three games that were never playable before now are.
It's my understanding that he also successfully dumped a few chips for MAME during this time as well.
Yes, it sucks that he got out of the game and moved on to something new, but he was charging us $250 to do work that would cost $50,000 or more per chip at the very cheapest from anywhere else. Again, not exaggerating. Many of us have approached various companies trying to find the best price on extracting the DSP-1 ROM data, and $50,000 was the best we could find.
(emphasis mine)
I think there's dispute of that figure somewhere in the thread or a related post I read, but it's Reddit, so it's hard to say whether that's a valid counter-opinion or just shit-posting
I have no interest in working with dangerous acids, nor do I have access to expensive microscopes, but I wouldn't mind assisting with the tedious work of tracing the circuit in polygons (assuming automated tools still can't do this accurately)