[drzaiusapelord]

If they're not designed to be repairable, this might be a tough nut to crap. How do you repair a IC soldered and black gooped to the circuit board? Or a piece of storage or firmware that's gone bad, but you can source the chip but not the code or the binaries?

[shabble]

Probably in much the same way as other hardware/software systems that weren't intended to be user-serviceable. The obvious comparison is old Arcade Games. There's a fine talk from 31C3[1] about it. You need to extract firmware from working systems, reverse engineer any custom chips & hardware, and duplicate/emulate it with sufficient fidelity to work with the rest of the system.

One difference here is that the critters have 'personality' which is developed over time and stored onboard somewhere in flash or eeprom. You'd need to find a way to back up or dump that data easily enough that everyone could do it regularly, because once it breaks it might be too late.

It's akin to preserving not only the arcade game, but also the high-scores table from your particular cabinet.

[1] http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_5997_-_en_-_...