BTM_Pix

With a hammer and chisel, EVERYTHING fits in a hotshoe.

So now the S9 camera needs this S9 controller.

By the by, one of the new firmwares for that FM-1 synth I was talking about was widely - and rightly - praised for how good it was and how completely transformative it was for the unit. People absolutely loved it. Then he had the temerity to want to sell it. Well you can imagine what happened next.

Can it run on a Pi5 by any chance as I may have an idea....

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. A major problem for anyone trying to create a product now is that increasingly a lot of people are incapable of just taking a look at it and moving on with their lives if they don’t fancy it. Absolutely everything HAS to have a dramatic performative reaction for so many people now. Its why we can’t just have anything nice anymore.

This live film simulation linked from that repo looks pretty interesting. Might give this a whirl on my A7R2. https://github.com/jegly/sonyalpha-film

Its interesting where this will lead to regarding used camera prices. Cameras that can be got at might well become far more valuable in the next year or so. So if you do come up with a way to get something wild running on these old bodies (other than video games of course 😀) then let us know which ones so we can get in before the gold rush !

Uli Behringer has made a very interesting statement on LinkedIn about going open source. When I say "interesting", I mean wild ! --------------------- "THE VALUE OF SOFTWARE IS HEADING TO ZERO. AND THAT’S WONDERFUL. The trillion-dollar software industry’s greatest threat isn’t competition. It’s a world that no longer needs to buy what it can create. For decades, software companies turned scarcity into extraordinary profits: proprietary code, expensive licenses, endless subscriptions, and customers locked into ecosystems they could barely escape. AI is now attacking the scarcity itself. And no layer of software is immune. Web applications: Generated on demand. Mobile apps: Personalized instead of mass-produced. Enterprise software: AI-native systems challenging traditional ERP, CRM, and SaaS empires. Industrial software: Automation and robotics becoming dramatically easier to program. Embedded software: Firmware, DSP, and FPGA development increasingly accelerated by AI. Safety-critical software: Even here AI will transform engineering, although certification and reliability remain non-negotiable. Different speeds. Different challenges. Same fundamental direction. The cost of creating code is collapsing. But here’s what makes this revolution so uncomfortable for the software industry: When software becomes abundant, owning code is no longer enough to justify premium prices. Reliability, security, and solving real problems will always have value. Customer captivity won’t. We’re entering the AGE OF ABUNDANCE. And I believe its economic impact will be far greater than most people imagine. At Music Tribe, we’re already embracing this future through AI-native systems, open-source software, and open hardware. Because abundance isn’t about making everything free. It’s about making opportunity accessible to everyone. A world where a young creator has access to capabilities once reserved for corporations. Where innovation no longer requires a fortune. Where creativity matters more than capital. Our purpose has always been to empower those who have not and cannot. AI and abundance may finally allow us to do that at an unprecedented scale. Scarcity asks: How much can we extract? Abundance asks: How many people can we empower? That’s not merely a technological revolution. It’s a fundamental challenge to the economics of capitalism built around artificial scarcity. And here’s my question to every software CEO: If your customers could build much of what you sell tomorrow, would they still pay you? If the answer is no, perhaps your greatest asset was never your technology. It was your customers’ lack of alternatives. " ---------------------

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.

That’s fantastic ! Good to see it getting a lot of love in the YouTube comments as well. I used to play the original over a null modem cable every lunchtime (and during erm “quiet times” in the rest of the day against a colleague. I’m not saying we were committed but I postponed my leaving date because we had only just started a new season.

Best I can currently see on offer for you is Doom on the Hasselblad X2D 100C…. The guy who showed that running recently has been very busy and is coaxing video recording from it. This is amongst a raft of other research he has been doing on feature extensions and documenting in his GitHub. https://github.com/radium-wang/Hasselblad-X-System-CIM-Firmware-Research-Feature-Extensions The pace at which he is doing this is quite something but it’s obviously uncertain on a timeframe of getting all this ready for prime time. These experiments also work on the “For God’s sake don’t pick it up in a shop or you’ll have to buy it” object of beauty that is the 907X/CFV100C

Yeah I was thinking of something like the Micro Studio G2 which I’m not sure has been a massive hit and they could be sat on a lot of stock where a cine driven firmware could kick start a comeback for it. Similarly, a highly configurable custom firmware for its actual intended use of a mini broadcast camera where a broadcaster could make it perform their exact needs would make it more appealing for them. And for suckers like me who have one for both purposes it would be a boon to have switchable firmware to make it more usable in the cine use. With regard to their bread and butter of broadcast, BM do a ton of “digital glue” type of stuff for conversion etc so I could see potential for a black box with HDMI I/O, SDI I/O, Ethernet, USB-C and Bluetooth and allow custom firmware to be used for it’s processor to do the exact type of conversion that you need at different times without having separate discrete boxes. So for example sometimes I want to do some SDI to HDMI, sometimes the other way round, sometimes I want to play media from USB to NDI etc etc but never at the same time. The obvious question would be why would BM only want me to buy one box when I’d have to buy multiple discrete boxes off them to do these tasks ? Obviously they’d prefer that but if I have to buy multiple discrete boxes my budget would dictate that I would have to buy cheaper generic products or secondhand versions of the BM ones - neither of which will generate new revenue for BM. That is very much what is driving the FM-1 take up and, as with that, people would be likely to eventually buy a multiple of the BM black box. Having stripped down open source hardware might well become a necessity to sell any quantity of products at affordable prices in the near future as RAM and storage prices continue their upward trajectory. None of it will happen of course but fanciful speculation a vital foundation block of this forum when things are quiet 😂

Blackmagic would also be another contender to do this.

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 😂

I think playing Densha de Go! on a Switch whilst on a train on the actual Yamanote line would be an embarrassing confession for a man of my advancing years. So I absolutely did not do that last year and will definitely not be doing it again next month. Absolutely not. Nor will I be getting the hardware controller for it either.