Magic Lumix - Panasonic S9 and GX80 officially hacked

[Andrew - EOSHD]

With the help of our AI friends, the first Panasonic hack since the GH2 has arrived.

So far the S9 and GX80 have the hack.

It auto-executes code from the card at boot, enabling the same kind of range of mods Magic Lantern does but on Lumix cameras for the first time. It takes compiled C code binaries and Arm64 code.

The CPU is extremely powerful... 64bit vs the 32bit EOS R5.

More info soon.

GM5 and GX9 to follow

[mercer]

Are you just testing the ability to hack and moving on, or will you eventually add features like raw video, log profiles, etc... where possible?

[PannySVHS]

Holy crap, that's awesome. Thanks a lot, Andrew! @Andrew - EOSHD I love the raw files out of my GX85. S16 crop, downsampled HD or cine 2K, 10bit or 12bit 3:1 CDNG would be perfect. Battery life is so much better than on my bmpcc. EVF, nice ergonomy, solid layout, buttons and wheels are great to have. But you all already know that of course. 🙂

[kye]

Incredible stuff!

I spent a bit of time asking ChatGPT if the GX85 could be hacked and it said that there were serious limitations, but like all mid-capability intelligences, if it hasn't been done then they erroneously overstep and assume it can't be done.

Are / will these be shared somewhere?

[MrSMW]

9 hours ago, Andrew - EOSHD said:

So far the S9 and GX80 have the hack

S9 specifically, to what purpose?

Other than Flappy Birds, obvs, but what does it otherwise mean?

Serious Q!

[Andrew - EOSHD]

When you run code in RAM you can do pretty much anything like Magic Lantern or the Sigma Fp hacks, so raw video, open gate and V-LOG for the GX80 is definitely on the cards. The S9 has a 64bit CPU so plenty of power to play with there.

Got to explore the hardware now and build the first proper feature for it so keep an eye on the blog for further developments!

[eatstoomuchjam]

An S9 with raw?  Are you going to make me go spend a few bucks.

[MrSMW]

Internal raw on the S9 would be at least something I’d have a play with and I guess the S5ii would be as ‘easy’ to crack?

[Andrew - EOSHD]

Nothing about it was easy 🙂

I can assure you that much!!

[Andrew - EOSHD]

Skipped Doom on the S9... Went straight to Quake at 60fps.

It makes the EOS R5 look like a bit of a potato.

Blog post and YouTube video coming soon.

[MrSMW]

13 hours ago, Andrew - EOSHD said:

Nothing about it was easy 🙂

I can assure you that much!!

I don’t mean easy easy but if you managed the S9, the S5ii should be easy-er?

[Anaconda_]

Nice! It seems the GX80 is the perfect camera. After all these years, it's still being used to great effect and by the looks of things, it's only getting better. It really is a shame Panasonic didn't give it an audio input. I regretted selling mine within a week, my favourite photo I've ever taken was with it.

Will you release these hacks for free?

[Framed_By_Dan]

Very excited to see what you come up with for the GX9.

[Andrew - EOSHD]

GX9 is on the to-do list.

Quake on the S9 is a proof of concept, a way to understand all the CPU and camera systems. I have it so the shutter button shoots the shotgun. It's very satisfying 🙂

It is now reliably 60fps without screen tearing or long load times, and the Pana UI gets out the way. So it's now understood how to draw on screen, how to disable default key actions and override them with our own control scheme, how to manage DMA memory and read/writes to the card, that's why a complex game is better than taking baby steps with basic 'hello world' stuff or menu tweaks, and so on. My LLM now has a comprehensive understanding of the ROM, the CPU, RAM, DMA, physical controls and so on. 5 years of work done in a single week.

Next up is audio, I'd like to get Quake's SFX working before the YouTube video gets shot of it all working.

Then starting work on adding camera features and actually useful stuff is much easier, having laid all the foundations in a solid way with Quake.

It boots automatically from SD card as well, without any need to enable service mode.

So very nice to use. Installing / enabling it for first time however is not a neat package yet. It'll remain closed source for a few months then I'll assess again. If I gave it all out now I'd have to take on an unacceptable level of legal risk and email work, from people complaining that it isn't 100% reliable yet and don't want any bricked cameras billed to my Greggs sausage roll account.

Once it's further down the road it should see light of day as long as Panasonic don't have me assassinated and Tony fucking Northrup doesn't do it first with Claude Vulture 7.8 on a spare weekend whilst sat in the bath.

[greenscreen]

Great news for the GX80! Already a little gem of a camera, and the possibility of V-Log and open gate makes it even more interesting.

[brucethemoose]

This got me to sign up in a hurry. Hello!

Anyway, what do you think is possible with that S9 CPU? JPEG gainmapping? Maybe even JXL encoding?

 

 

[Andrew - EOSHD]

Pretty much anything you can dream of and can write in C code or Arm64.

It even has a bluetooth host and USB HID capability which means all sorts of accessories can be accommodated with custom functionality.

Steam Controller 2 as a follow focus anyone? 🙂

[Snowfun]

On a not totally unrelated topic… I decided to (try to) move away from the huge corporations and bought the Punkt. MC03 phone (Swiss, built in Germany), it runs aphyOS derived, as I understand it, from grapheneOS an AOSP build.  And it is a great phone. Secure, relatively cheap (compared to Apple…) and does what a phone should do. So far so good. But… it doesn’t run my banking or airline or other travel apps. So it can only ever be a second phone. A statement piece or, if you prefer, virtue signalling.

Doesn’t this encapsulate the essence and problems inherent to all “punk” software? It may be superior. It may be supporting small business or individuals working hard to produce great products. But it is unlikely to meet our expectations out of the box. Until society drops that sense of entitlement I fear genuine effort won’t be rewarded. And, of course, society has become conditioned by the Corporate mentality to such an extent that we think we want precisely what they can give us.

That said…  this is all astonishingly impressive! 

[brucethemoose]

4 hours ago, Andrew - EOSHD said:

Pretty much anything you can dream of and can write in C code or Arm64.

It even has a bluetooth host and USB HID capability which means all sorts of accessories can be accommodated with custom functionality.

Steam Controller 2 as a follow focus anyone? 🙂

But how much free RAM does it have though?What kind of core is the ARM CPU?

Just thinking out loud, if it’s below like 512MB to work with or something, one would have to get creative with (say) newer software encoders. But if it’s substantially more, that is a lot to play with…

[Andrew - EOSHD]

Connect it to HDMI and bingo you have a games console