Canon 500D Firmware Hack - Progress Report 1

Jonny's idea of fun!

Jonny Petts. It’s a name violently ricocheting around the inside of quite a few Canon 500D owners heads out there and it’s no wonder either. Jonny, after all, is the man trying to bring manual controls (amongst other things) to the 500D!

In case you didn’t know, Jonny, has taken up the cause of trying to bring some of the functionality from not only the Canon 550D, but also from the Magic Lantern Canon 5DMKII Firmware, to the Canon 500D. The original post can be found here, but if you caught that, read on for the update.

Here’s what Jonny had to say about the progress thus far. . .If you understand all of it, you’re doing much better than me!

So, as you know this isn’t going to be an easy or quick task. It took Trammel Hudson 100′s of hours to make the Magic Lantern 5DMKII Firmware.

Since we last spoke, two other people have joined the team, and having quite a lot of knowledge in this area, taken a lead position.

One of them, Tester 13, said “The Canon 500D dump is easy, as dissectfw decrypts flasher properly for 500d firmware. But the Canon 550D is different here as we either need a dump or clean flasher to figure out encryption tables. Maybe the encryption has totally changed. So it must be statistically checked if we still have XOR. It is hard to improve anything in Canon 500D as it is restricted by used sensor. And disassembling won’t help you here, as you need documentation for many Digic, ADC and other registers. In reality any real progress that we have in ML is related wither to PTP commands (easy to find and understand), screen video memory (same thing), or audio codec (functions could be spotted and used model is known). It is not surprising that the other fields are much harder. ” (Dont know how many of you will understand this, but hay ho!)

So we now have dumps of the Canon 500D and now need the Canon 550D dump. It is proving hard to get, but this is not my field. Tester 13 has tried using Trammel’s firmware unpacker but apparently it “doesn’t work due to different XOR tables. Even with a working unpacker Trammel couldn’t dump the 7D firmware for months.”

So Tester13 is currently the driving force in this operation, whilst I am just looking through the dump of the Canon 500D and gaining knowledge via. forums. I would like to stress I AM NO TRAMMEL HUDSON, I am just someone who is trying to orchestrate the creation of this firmware for the benefit of others.

Thank you,

Jonny

One thing that Jonny did ask me to make known, is that if you think you can contribute to this project and have anything that may be of assistance to him and Tester 13, please make yourself known in the comments so I can pass along your details. A combined effort is much more likely to see this effort succeed, you know, ‘many hands make light work’ and all that stuff.

Stay tuned for more news on Jonny’s progress. . .

More soon. . .