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Comment by GranPC | Hacker News Reader

What's the situation re: running on actual hardware these days? I was experimenting around with my 4000D but when it came to trying to actually run my code on the camera rather than the emulator, a1ex told me I needed some sort of key or similar. He told me he'd sign it for me or something but he got busy and I never heard back.

Is this situation still the same? (Apologies for the hazy details -- this was 5 years ago!)

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That must have been a few years back. I think you're talking about enabling "camera bootflag". We provide an automated way to do this for new installs on release builds, but don't like to make this too easy before we have stable builds ready. People do the weirdest stuff, including trying to flash firmware that's not for their cam, in order to run an ML build for that different cam...

Anyway, I can happily talk you through how to do it. Our discord is probably easiest, or you can ask on the forum. Discord is linked from the forum: https://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/

Whatever code you had back then won't build without some updates. 4000D is a good target for ML, lots of features that could be added.

Yes, this was in September 2020 according to my records. All I remember is that I could run the ROM dumper just fine, then I could run my firmware in QEMU, and then I just had to locate a bunch of function pointers to make it do anything useful. Worked in QEMU but that's where I got stuck - no way to run it on hardware.

I'll definitely keep this in mind and hit you up whenever I have a buncha hours to spare. :)

That would have been only a little before a1ex left. Getting code running on real hardware is easy, maybe I'll talk to you in discord in a few months when you find this fabled free time we are all looking for ;)

The 4000D is an interesting cam, we've had a few people start ports then give up. It has a mix of old and new parts in the software. Canon used an old CPU / ASIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Canon_EOS_digital_cam...

So it has hardware from 2008, but they did update the OS to a recent build. This is not what the ML code expects to find, so it's been a confusing test of our assumptions. Normally the OS stays in sync with the hardware changes, which means when we're reversing, it's hard to tell which changes are which.

That said, 4000D is probably a relatively easy port.

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