Andrew - EOSHD

GH2 hack project could be coming back soon without a dirty russian... stay tuned.

I have never been more disappointed with the new generation and their pathetic social media conditioned brains. Can only hope Gen Alpha might be better and be more curious to understand how things work again, getting back some of that punk spirit people used to have rather than them being absolutely zombified consumers. It's weird - they have grown up in a gilded age of tech but some of the GenZ lot are the worst luddites imaginable!

55 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

Seems like you’ve had a head on collision with a combination of gatekeepers and the sort of cranks who also cosplay as medieval sword fighters as their other hobby.

The internet is fucking broken in every sense, in the community way, in the commercial way. Was making great progress until it came time to release stuff online... I don't fancy putting fliers on lampposts and leaflets through doors, so online it is...

It was like stumbling out into a post apocalyptic hellscape of anger, bots and gatekeepers, so different to how it was in the 2000s and 2010s...

What a fucked up insight it is into software dev and releasing stuff I've had so far in 2026.

Seems that influencers have conditioned everyone to expect everything for free, you just can't charge money for work any more even if it is a cutting edge NLE, they expect open source, free, and zero copyright so they can clone the source code and offer their own. Dark days ahead.

It seems partly a generational thing not just social media (I hope not) but the internet crowd is tough to please for the camera hacks too. The Mario 64 stuff went nowhere. On reddit even outright hostility - a mix of luddites and anti-AI. A lot of the younger folk who have grown up without computer skills (phone conditioned) don't seem to appreciate the technical side at all, or have that nice pirate outlook on it. They have gone from punks to a "why would I risk bricking my valuable possession" mindset, and I don't remember this being the case in 2013 with Magic Lantern and the 5D Mark II raw video mod, even pros we using it.

The internet needs sorting out. It's a cesspool.

Today, a slightly goosed Sony RX10 IV arrives from MPB (well... it might do)

I've got Claude waiting behind the door with a scythe.

The plan is to use a file called "bootin.elf"

This little elf (or goblin?) is the Sony equivalent to Canon's famous autoexec.bin

I'll see where I can get with it.

The Panasonic hacking is hitting a bit of a dead end but more hopeful with the Sony cameras - I don't want to go down the old Android PlayMemories route either - got to be something to offer the new cameras not just the A7R II or A6000!

Reversing tool is here if anyone fancies having a go on their A7 III or newer... https://github.com/ma1co/sony-pmca-re

Some more progress with Mario 64 on the EOS R5

The camera has a GPU hidden away with OpenGL.

Software rendering is out. Mario is now rendering on the GPU which means the Nintendo 64 of cameras just got a significant hardware bump. The previous version ran only in software (ARM CPUs), the GPU version looks identical at the moment but with much more headroom to go gangbusters on frame rate, resolution and 3D rendering techniques.

It would wind up being useful for photography and filmmaking apps if it had OpenGL general compute capabilities, still exploring that bit.

Meanwhile I have my film emulation app that started on the 5D Mark II working on the EOS R5 (and soon R8). They are beasts of a camera, let's hope it doesn't over heat

I have also been looking at the Panasonic cameras for Canon style Claude opportunities.

My S9 is very bolted down and not getting very far. My G9 II takes the ROM dump service mode key combo (AF-ON + PLAY + POWER ON) but the ROM dump options are like your G81 - they dump meta data and camera settings not a firmware dump from RAM so Claude can't take a look at the unencrypted ROM binary. The S9 doesn't even take the key combo which is odd as G9 II and S9 are same gen.

The other avenue in USB PTP commands to trigger a deeper service mode of some sort, but one of these commands crashed my G9 II so I backed off after that. Might be worth probing on a throwaway camera though.

After the GH1 and GH2 hack I think Panasonic bolted down the hatches! Still hopeful it can be figured out though.

Made something that GenZ can appreciate.

A lot of amazing stuff is happening and very impressed with what folk are doing with the Fp, a lot of world first stuff - weirdly though I've noticed a strangely cynical and downbeat response on social media to the R8 stuff. Has hacking jumped the shark and are the social media click weasels and photographers all now much harder to please than in 2012 with raw video?

Maybe the Gen Z photographers don't consider it impressive or newsworthy, because they don't know how a computer works let alone a camera hack 😂

16 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

Nice one.

I’m not reunited with my capable Mac for a month but I will bite your hand off for a version.

Is there any chance of it working on my SteamDeck by the way?

I seem to remember something about sending race progress to each other on a floppy through the actual post.

That is some latency !

I’d still be working at that company if me and my mate had been in different branches and had to rely on that method of two player games.

Yeah i'm doing a version for the SteamDeck, and someone has already reported it works on a Legion Go 2 under Windows.

I got my force feedback wheel working with it today, supporting the haptics API via SDL3 on Windows, and that works on Linux too I think!

There's a funny anomaly in the original GP2.exe binary for CPU cars / AI.

Katayama is ranked the third best driver after Schumacher and Hill 🙂

Today I am also spending time on hacking the Lumix S9 so might port it to that as well 🙂

Great stuff... If you fancy trying it on your Mac just let me know and I'll send you the full version. I used to print out my lap records and distinctly remember the first one (F1GP) came on about 7 floppies for the Atari ST. So GP2 was a big step up. Never played it linked like you though... fancy

It had a very nice hot seat mode where you took turns with a friend on the same pc during a race, separate cars and the AI would take over.

Now the AI takes over quite a bit else as well!

On 10/30/2026 at 12:59 PM, BTM_Pix said:

Some really interesting things going on in the electronic music world at the moment.

A company called M-Vave released a product called the FM-1 which is a little £60 synth that ostensibly does FM synthesis like a baby Yamaha DX7 but adds other features and controls.

Someone decided to see if they could use Claude or Codex to see if they could hack it and put their own firmware on it to change it into what they wanted it to do.

And they were successful.

So other people thought they’d do the same to turn it into what they wanted it to do.

A lot of other people in fact.

I lost count at fifty but there is more or less a new firmware from someone every day making the FM-1 into what they want it to be for their music making.

And most of them are completely different from each other and take into account different genres of music making and more preferred workflows etc

The FM-1 is now just a development platform of components and everyone uses the screen, keypad, switches and encoders completely differently.

And how did M-Vave respond to this ?

Throw their toys out of the pram and threaten to brick everyone’s device and issue legal threats ?

Nope, they went “Fucking hell this is cool” and released the source code so everyone can actually build off it more effectively and make even more cool firmwares for different genres of music and unique workflows.

This largesse is obviously underpinned by their understanding that this will sell WAY, WAY more FM-1s than if they went the other way.

Previously, anyone who didn’t want the very specific type of synthesis and workflow the FM-1 offered would have gone “That’s cute and great value for money but it’s not something for me”.

Now it’s appealing to EVERYONE because there are firmwares to suit everyone and if there isn’t then it’s within their grasp to roll their own.

So not only buying it, they are buying them in multiples to have different firmwares on them.

This has been going on for about six weeks and whilst it’s been interesting in and of itself it’s what it’s caused in the past week that is very eye opening.

This is an Akai MPC one, a very sophisticated music production device that retails for about £700.

Behringer have now announced this, the Kick

Now, under normal circumstances this would raise a few moans but no surprise as Behringer have built their business on releasing products that are heavily “influenced” by other peoples.

However, what is different here is that they’ve seen what’s happened with the FM-1 and the Kick is not only open source but is also only going to be $150

Even by their standards that price is wild.

And they haven’t stopped there.

On consecutive days they’ve released two other products (a drum machine and a sequencer) that are also open source and the same price point if not lower.

Akai have come back with their own new product that will also be open source.

The genie is out the bottle here and going forward these companies are now just effectively selling development platforms with minimal functional “examples of operation” firmware.

And cutting out the cost to them and the end user of full blown software development.

Want a feature ? Make it yourself from the building blocks we give you and leave us alone.

From a manufacturer point of view, not having to deal with the demands of a certain section of whiney entitled arseholes who want everything bespoke to them even when it didn’t include it in the spec when they bought it would be reason enough to go this route 😂

Anyway, I’m wondering if a camera manufacturer might be brave enough to go down this route ?

Cameras as development platforms would be pretty amazing wouldn’t it?

Traditional guardians of the cripple hammers would be aghast but there’s nothing to stop an upstart manufacturer from doing it.

Someone like Sigma or Sigma or even Sigma would be very appropriate.

If they look at what’s happening with the nascent FP hacking and embrace it rather than ignoring it then things could get very interesting.

I don’t even think it needs to be either or as they could do this in parallel.

FP2 for £1800 or whatever it is and the FP2Dev for say £1400 would be an interesting proposition.

They could hardware protect it to fully lock down the FP2.

Well, for a while at least 😂

This is really interesting and it does beg the question, how long can closed insular world of camera software and features continue before it's the norm to sideload all sorts

I absolutely love what Behringer do with the bargain knock-offs, don't know how they do the prices they do. I just bought a UMC204HD for recording some analogue sources into my Mac and for 60 euros it's ridiculously good and works straight out the box with anything. I even had Claude knock up a DAW for it!

Sigma Fp-L... I've been down the Canon rabbit hole but deffo going to take a look at it more this week.

It's ridiculous how much I am getting done with a bit of help from the deep learning version of Kryten.

Here's my Grand Prix game if anyone wants to give the free demo a spin. It's a graphics engine that ports an old classic (Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 2) to modern hardware and adds a lot of new features on top. www.gp2rev.com

I am also making progress with film mods for the G7X II and EOS R8. The ones for dslrs are now so common from the clickweasal community that there is practically no point competing though!

If this shit gets too easy, the software landscape is going to be.... interesting, to say the least.

7 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

Nor will I be getting the hardware controller for it either.

I definitely did not get one delivered from a Japanese ebay seller after watching that video in 2021

And have absolutely no plans to go picking it out of the cupboard to see if it works with the PS2 to USB PC adapter I definitely didn't just order.

There is absolutely no chance of me being distracted by getting claude to hack up a PC version of the PS2 Densha de Go ROM in a reverse engineering session and making it work on my Windows machine. I don't get sidetracked by things like that any more.

And it certainly won't be coming to the EOS R5 later next month.

Also no chance of a USB C experiment on that camera with joypads, that would be extremely silly.

Has someone been watching a lot of Techmoan again? 🙂

I need to get myself an S5IIx but can't afford one 🙂

I am more tempted to give the S9 a go and have it be the first camera to run snake!

ALL ABOUT IT:
https://www.eoshd.com/news/eoshd-backrom-hack-mario-64-on-the-canon-eos-r8/

Absolutely brilliant.

14 hours ago, mercer said:

Sigma could have released this camera with the updated screen, a slightly larger body to accommodate CF Express for internal 4K raw, added IBIS, and literally changed nothing else and it would have been a good update.
 

Instead they give us ProRes Raw and it isn't clear if it's internal or to SSD only and then gave us a full hdmi?! Why do we need a full hdmi if they're giving us internal, or usb ssd, ProRes Raw?! They could have omitted any HDMI and gave us a CFX slot.

You can save $800 and buy the Z5iiC and have internal n-raw to sd card, af and ibis.

I think it looks like a good deal to me.

The articulated screen is a big plus over the original cameras. L-LOG too (interesting that they took Leica's rather than make their own Sigma LOG or use Panasonic's).

ProRes RAW is to SSD. Internal 8bit Cinema DNG seems to have gone away.

All cameras need an HDMI port - far better it be full sized than micro.

Autofocus is a big improvement too, as is the open gate sensor, much less rolling shutter, higher resolution recording, bigger battery (the original used the same battery as the GH2!!)

I'd rather have one of these over the Z6 III, it only lacks IBIS and internal raw.

But as any GH2 owner will tell you... You don't really need either 🙂

4 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

Most importantly, but missing off these lists is internal L-log and internal 10-bit. Two really key things that were missing on the original. Also 32bit audio! 

It's a shame the pin connections on the side are different from the original though.

Is that list from DPReview, it's wrong... internal L log is there and 10bit and 32bit audio.

No Cinema DNG though?

Looks like same sensor as Nikon Zr.

It's a pity about the lack of IBIS IMHO.

Good write up here on the cine side:

https://www.fdtimes.com/2026/10/23/sigma-fp2/

I went on DPR today and they have still not sorted their design out.

There's still the massive negative space (holes in the design) and big fan shitty ads.

For a cameraholic like me this is cultural vandalism 🙂

But I have a plan to do something about it

Here's how it looks like today:

The entire 16 inch Macbook display has just 4 lines of editorial content on it - a headline and a short paragraph.

I think this is probably a purposeful decision to make you scroll so that more ads appear.

But honestly, it's one of the most backward looking website designs I've ever seen. Worse than had it been made in the 90s.

If it's worth the effort for you guys I can make a browser extension that revises the design, to get it looking closer to how the original did and use u-block origin to get rid of the ads. It'll take a bit of effort, but if enough people want I'll make it 🙂

Make DPR Great Again!

Sounds good @QuickHitRecordhave you made some interest progress so far. Does it run doom? 🙂

Claude Code and Codex are making a lot of things possible on the camera side, I have a Sigma FP hack in the works as well. This runs on a known Japanese OS (T-Kernel-family RTOS), so patches and features can be run from the SD card. No risky firmware hacking required!

21 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Rumors have it being the FP II which might include the S1 II sensor for about $2,500 and in a body roughly the size of the original FP?  If it has internal 12-bit raw and PDAF, that could be pretty neat.  The S1 II sensor is, from everything I've heard, very good.

It's a little tricky, though, as just about any small/portable camera being released now exists in the same world as the Nikon ZR.  For me, if all other things are equal, I'd do an extra $300 for the better sensor (The S1 II sensor, that is).

Hopefully S1 II sensor not S5 II!

Really looking forward to this.

If it has all the missing stuff... Articulated screen, IBIS, built in EVF, Sony-level autofocus, then I'll be getting one.

A lot to pack into an Fp sized body but if anyone can do it, Sigma can.

And $2500 would be absolutely fine for something like that with internal raw and a unique form factor that goes after the FX5 and gives it a good mauling.

All without shareholder money too... Well done Kazuto san.

By the way, the GH2 was one of the last Panasonic cameras to have unencrypted firmware and then even when encrypted with an update, Vitaliy found a way to decrypt it and make the hack possible. I've been looking into a possible further hack for the GH2, with Claude on the job and making decent progress. LUT -> Custom Photo Style might be possible and a lot of other things!

It looks like our favourite GH2 hacker has shut up shop, personal-view.com is no longer active and the domain points elsewhere.

I'll miss it