Andrew - EOSHD

Don't worry nothing will be worth releasing at this rate anyway, as the social media influencers would have flooded the market with magic lantern based bait for free and sucked up all the attention out the room. Mario (NES version) on 200D has millions of views on Instagram. Mario 64 on a camera never hacked before (R8 and R5)... Crickets. If this has taught me a lesson, it is that the internet is no longer about merit.

They are both Arm64. That doesn't give an M1 Mac permission to bypass Nintendo's encryption, that's a separate issue.

Well, that's your choice isn't it? It doesn't mean to say others won't, but this is why a degree of professionalism and doing software as a livelihood matters because if its just engineered as influencer bait and flung out for free, you're more likely to end up with a brick. On the other hand if the source is trusted and the risk is assessed as being very low, I'd pay for that personally especially if it enables a feature on a camera in a world first that's useful. It also depends what type of mod it is... Does it flash firmware? Or does it enable an existing service mode to run scripts off a card? This is where a bit of knowledge from the customer helps so they can understand the risk being diving in with some Instagrammer's free shit. As for vibe coding... Depending on the combination of what type of human and what type of AI model wrote the code, the quality of the vibe coded version is a very wide spectrum... It can wind up being much better than the human slop code and better than some of the human professional code as well. OK So we agree that real knowledge and thought are worth paying for. How do you square that with "Imagine if Magic Lantern came with a pricetag!" then? Especially those pros who used it for paid work in the mid 2010s and delivered raw Cinema DNG to paying clients, without even so much as a donation to those who put the hard work in. I am skeptical - the software needs to break the encryption or emulate what the Switch hardware decoder does.

That could be an interesting way of doing it. Influencers open sourcing stuff for attention has done a lot of damage to expectations. If a mod or software is relatively low effort (like most free stuff is) and unsupported, of course giving it away will drum up attention for clicks...For anything of high quality, the dev has to take on the legal risk, the bricking risk, and the customer support emails - it's a full time job.

Very nice shots 👍

I expect you still need the private keys to break encryption so they run without the Switch's ROM's encoder/decryption service. This is nothing like how Magic Lantern worked. You should be grateful there are people willing to take that risk. And at least they make the effort to understand the legal side, unlike the armchair internet experts. Yes I agree, how dare they run a business in communist camera town. ---- The same people whinging about an indie dev selling a genuinely amazing tool for $5 are the ones who happily pay Adobe $50 per month on a subscription, the monster which their dumb attitude towards software licenses created in the first place. I have never seen such an entitled generation of users in my life when it comes to software. Every smartphone app is now freemium junk, that relies on gating features behind a subscription because nobody wants to pay the $5 one off up front. Open source and free is the fastest way to find the bottom of the software quality barrel. If you can't pay the devs, yet expect them to answer customer support requests 100 times a day, how do you expect them to keep grinding at the millstone and updating the project? Why do you think so much of the open source stuff gets abandoned by the main devs? Even Magic Lantern at one point too? I just think the whole attitude is fucking stupid to be honest.

Progress report The GF1 in a world first is hacked and runs apps automatically after boot-up, with an autoexec.bin file on the card. Onto the GH1 and GH2 next. Efforts for the GX80 are ongoing.

I've resurrected the GH1, GH2, GF1 hack project today and aim to port ptools to Mac OS. I also want find out if apps and code can run off the SD card like it does on Canon's cameras with autoexec.bin If so, we can go far beyond just patching firmware parameters for bitrates! Also looking into GX80. I can enter service mode on my GX80 and G9 II but they are much, much more locked down than the GH1 was. After the GH2, Panasonic went ape shit and tightened everything up - much more so than Canon and Sony did. It might also be possible to flash custom firmware, that enables an app store type thing - running code off the card with modded firmware. This is riskier as flashing buggy firmware still in development to test it in-camera does risk a bricking moment. That's why it might be necessary to make an emulator first or at least use an ARM emulator to test stuff on the Mac before flashing to the camera. It helps to understand the risks clearly, for all camera hack projects. Here they are from least to most severe: [NO ALARM BELLS. Least risky] - The Canon stuff is lowest risk, the official firmware has an official Canon feature that runs code off the card in-camera, the only firmware adjustment is a parameter to set it to do so (its like setting a Lumix into service mode with a key combo, but writes a flag via the firmware updater). This is a lovely way of doing custom camera features - but labours under the misconception of the uneducated users who think that it's illegally hacked custom firmware - in fact it's more like an app store for a phone. [JUST A FIRE DRILL. A bit more scary but rare] - The risk of crashing a camera mid-EPROM write, cameras might update or save menu settings to the EPROM and if you're extremely unlucky and your app running in the background for some reason crashes the camera during that brief moment you could end up with corrupted ROM data. This is what Magic Lantern warn about but its never happened to me in all of 15+ years, seems very rare for others too. Also add to this category - probing shit via USB. [QUIET ALARM BELLS should be ringing especially if using a lower-tier LLM for the modded firmware or code] - The in-between solution - small changes to the firmware machine code, a recompiled binary flashed to the camera to enable some path in like a service mode or auto-execution of code from the card. That does require a customised firmware flashed to the camera and so needs real care not to fuck it up. [BIG FUCKING LOUD BELLS. Not something I would try on an expensive camera, but I would experiment this way on a beaten up old one] - The all-out custom firmware route - all the mods and apps are flashed to the firmware so they run from the ROM, it's very risky as anything buggy that might interfere with the booting of the camera might lock you out-forever and need a re-flash of the firmware ROM at an official service centre, or even a mainboard replacement.

There's a difference between a hack and a piece of software and I don't agree that there's a blanket legal problem with selling third party hacks anyway. There's a lot of naivety and bedwetting when it comes to the legal side. If you get a DMCA from Canon, so be it. Nobody in their right mind is going to come fishing in my bank account with a $5000 per hour lawyer just to get my last £1.50 which I spent at Greggs. The Nintendo Switch emulators use a private key that's property of Nintendo to break encryption, which does make them illegal. Booting software via existing camera system features is not the same at all. If you stay away from the illegal stuff like bypassing firmware signing, distributing private encryption keys, it helps!

An update on the Sony RX10 IV side... It's able to run scripts! This was a small test C script. Next is to get it to automatically run code off the card at normal boot-up without service mode or USB tethering.

How dare they be able to pay the rent and eat!!

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! 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