Share the information

Quickee2 I am sending u a pm.

Once again i asked a question. Do YOU know that you have the right to change the firmware ? That is the point i was trying to make there. pinto2 stated as fact that he had that right. I said are you sure because i don't know.

All opinions aside, does anyone here know ? Not your feelings, but the legal aspect.

Tom

Who cares because it's been done many times. It's to late now to care. If NEC or any other manufacturer cared they would have done something about it already trust me. Not many, many burners later. They don't sit on there asses. I'm sure they know about all the firmware releases. They even hinted about in nfo released with the 2.18 firmware remember. Didn't sound like they cared much in the nfo.

My mistake. It just sounded as if you already had your mine made up about the subject.

See, that's the difference in the point that i don't think you are seeing. A widely available tool like Omnipatcher for NEC has never been available.
I'm not talking about 5 or 10 people releasing hacked firmwares, i'm talking about someone putting out a tool that could potentially ruin the drive without the new firmware being tested first.
Remember ,most of these hacked firmwares seem to be tested somewhat by a few before they are released for all of us or are done by people that are experienced. You lose that when you are giving people the tool.

And if you wonder why they would be concerned ,read your own words:

Yeah ,they'd be real happy to be getting all these drives back with changed serial numbers LOL

Maybe THEN that would be enough to piss them off and find who was hosting the tools.

I don't know .It was just thrown out there as a defense for the people like Liggy and Quikee and Dee not releasing the tools until they are refined enough to be as "foolproof" as can be.
Which according to Dee, they are not at this point.

Tom

That constitutes FRAUD, and it is wrong. If I were Dee or liggy I wouldn't really want the tool released either. You would have lots of fubaar drives and bunches of posts on how to fix them. Not to mention the questions on how to use the tool, it would be a helluva mess. Sharing the info for them would involve a lot more work than simply making firmwares and moderating the forum. As far as people screwing up their drives and returning them, I think they are afraid of them making non flashable drives or some sort of protection on it so you can't flash it with hacked firmwares. That would be really easy to impliment and it would eliminate firmware tweaking completely. I would really like to learn how to mod firmwares myself, but right now I'm just going to sit back and slowly soak up info. I have used a hex editor before on a few things and I'm far from proficient at it. I would hope that most people would take one look at the tool and the firmware in that state and decide it wasn't for them. Then there are those that would try without the knowledge they need and make a paperweight. After a few paperweights make their way back to nec and they figure out what's going on, we get hosed with protected drives.

Now from a legal standpoint, a firmware is a form of software, just like a bios for a motherboard. If you notice there is a copyright in the bios of your motherboard. I'm sure the same exists for firmwares or the ECM (engine control module/computer) in your car. That does make modding firmwares a violation of the copyrights, but nobody has been prosecuted for it yet. That's because it's not been viewed as a problem yet, and as long mass ammounts of drives aren't getting hosed, it won't. Just like music downloads, before it hurt their wallets, they didn't care.

Just an example of how this whole mess works. A friend of mine bought a liteon 832s, first he flashed it with the wrong firmware. We got the drive back with a flash tool that allowed you to blind flash by specifying the IDE port. Then he tried to make a firmware with omnipatcher for it, he had no IDEA what he was doing when he started. After he flashed it with that firmware he made, that drive would burn nothing but coasters. Even after trying to go back to an original liteon firmware it wouldn't burn a readable disk. So the drive went back to bestbuy and liteon ate it in the end.

The whole point is if that incident happens enough, they are going to do something about it. Now with a tool that's harder to use than the omnipatcher released to everybody, that's sure to happen. Some people may be able to handle the responsibility of it and even make good firmwares. Then there are a lot who THINK they can, and they don't find out until it's too late. If they release the tool to one, they will have to release it to all or the will be hounded endlessly. Like liggy said, you should be able to figure it out for yourself if you're ready to do this. I completely understand why they are doing it this way and we should respect it.

I like your moral pathos jtommyj, and the care you show toward us all, not that educated.

I think, as far as we don´t use this

logo on our board, we can all share information without being afraid of "the court" or NEC.
Still remember one "firmware modder" using this logo, but he is nowhere to be seen nowdays.

Back to business folks.

The question I really see is how bad will a write strat not meant for a disc hurt the drive? BTW it is done and tested everyday with the current modded firmwares and releases. I also do believe Liggy never tested any of his firmwares either , since he doesn't own the drive (remember reading posted by dee in her and liggy's thread). I believe that should be all that is involved and don't think it will hurt the drive at all. All they are doing with the firmwares and trying to see what write strats work the best. Do you see or hear them talking about anything else being changed? If anything it should just cause a crappy burn. Which all we take a chance in doing is wasting a disc. If a firmware patcher is released if should have a primary firmware already set that cannot be touched such as riplock and bitsetting, and only write strats to be modded by the user. I don't see how this can cause a problem? Someone correct if my thinking is wrong and prove it please.

And about the returing part. So, I'm shady like that. Don't care what u think.

I don't really understand what you are saying here, it may be a language thing.

"the care you showed toward us all,not that educated"

I have no idea what that means but you are welcome i think.

Tom

This was never the debate. The write strategy changer like Omnipatcher wasn't even brought up until halfway thru the thread. Up until that point people were whining about the tools like a hex editor and the knowledge to do it all themselves, not about a simple write strategy changing tool.
As far as how shady you are i couldn't care less .You don't need to care what i think just like Liggy and Dee and Quikee don't need to care what you think about them not releasing the info either.
Shady ? nahh ,that's not shady it's just immature .If you got the big stones to play around with your drive at least have the stones to buy another if you screw it up. Or if you don't have any stones you can always change the serial numbers and .... oh wait, sorry. We already know the answer here don't we.

Well I was commenting on your own post if it was not the debate why were u mentioning it and saying it was a bad idea. I was just proving u wrong that a patcher will not hurt anything at all, but media we test. See your own words below that i was replying to and that i did quote in my post.

Originally Posted by jtommyj
See, that's the difference in the point that i don't think you are seeing. A widely available tool like Omnipatcher for NEC has never been available.
I'm not talking about 5 or 10 people releasing hacked firmwares, i'm talking about someone putting out a tool that could potentially ruin the drive without the new firmware being tested first.
Remember ,most of these hacked firmwares seem to be tested somewhat by a few before they are released for all of us or are done by people that are experienced. You lose that when you are giving people the tool.

OK I understand there is a lot of demand for overspeeding in modded firmwares, personally I only use the XXXrpc1.bin from TDB whenever I patch my drive. I don't mind burning my media at the speed that has been approved by the manufacturer. The only thing I've ever considered patching to other than that is an all @ 16X firmware so that everybody can decide for themselves if they want to turn their Princo's into coasters. Anyone working on that for NEC?????

Look,seriously,you have no idea what an NEC patcher could or couldn't hurt in reality since it hasn't even been released. Do you know for a fact it will only do exactly as the Lite-On omnipatcher will and work that way or do the NEC firmware have to be adjusted in a different way? If it were so simple to know all this,we would have people putting the code in to the firmwares for quality Pi/Pif tests also (which i would prefer over an omnipatcher) if it were so simple to just add code to a firmware. There are all questions that will need to be answered before anyone knows anything about it.
I think you are doing the people who work on this stuff a great disservice when you try to make it so simple.
You threw out all credibility with your little shady comments.
I thought yesterday you were getting rid of the NEC anyway and getting the Pioneer since your friends 107 burns anything ? So why are your panties in a a bunch about the NEC ?

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.ph...28&postcount=2
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.ph...&postcount=159

Just let it go and time will tell.

---

Last edited by jtommyj; 23-11-2004 at 07:36.

Well, we will see when Quikee2 is done with his patcher. I wish him luck.

BTW. Yes I was considering it, but I recently had a successful burn thanks to Quikee2. I will see how this burner turns out in the long run.

That we agree on. I wish him and Dee and everyone working on it luck also.

Tom

As I remember, Herrie once made a guide about firmware...but I cant find it anymore. He described the what, how and when...but back then, I was only interested in patching my 1300a. Now Im up to my 4th drive and and wanted to play alittle with the write strag.

If anybody has that guide from Herrie, please pass it along.

I have to say the one thing I love about the net is the wealth of information out there. Sure if you look hard enough you can find information & how 2's about anything. I have always been of the mind that most people ask questions because they are willing to learn. There are always going to be those that are lazy as hell and don't take even a little bit of time to search. However sometimes like brantdk pointed out, the information is difficult to find simply because to research something you first need to know some of the relevant terms which you may not have a clue about. This is why I like forums because those that are in the ‘know’ can often point the ignorant in the right direction.

To simply be dismissive of those questioning souls is arrogant. I am not painting anyone here with that brush. I am merely stating an observation I've made w.r.t. some technical people who roam forums collecting adoration for their work as if kudos was some how redeemable at the pearly gates. In particular guys like the author of that "DVDdisInfo pap" carrying on as he has been, in my view hurt the community far more than leading people in the right direction of how to gain the knowledge to build there own F/w's.

Many people will ruin their drives trying things out for sure but to deprive someone of information because of the possibility of them ruining their drive is a little OTT. After all they could just as easily ruin it by using anyone’s patched f/w's.

I for one really appreciate Liggy and now Quikee's contribution to the community & all their hard work. If you guys decided to leave for whatever reason then we would have to wait for some other like minded person in the 'know' to come along. Look at what happened when Herrie took a sabbatical and the panicked forum threads that ensued.

Man I had to post a question on how to use "2500 dump" because I thought that it dumped the write strategy info from the f/w in the drive....LOL. BTW I did do a search before I asked and couldn't find any good explanations but thanks to pinto2's and Quikee's help they sorted me out. In my view knowledge is wealth and real kudos comes from helping others attain that knowledge. The enlightened person is the one that helps maintain this cycle not hinder it.

At this point I am quite happy to let more inclined persons than me develop the f/w I use. After all I trust them, they are doing a fine job so far. I would have thought that if I ever was inclined to gain the required knowledge then someone around hear could reciprocate that trust. From some of the posts it appears there is a big difference of opinion however.

Update.

Reading some of the posts in this thread again, I can see I have missunderstod Dee-27 and I appologize her for that.

To my defence I would like to add, as already stated by me on page one in this thread; I never asked anybody to "release" the "currently used patcher".

Thanks.

Someone pointed out the existance of this thread, and since there's a lot of talk of OP, I think that there are some comments that should be made...

1/ Patching firmwares is not always a matter of flipping a bit here and there. OmniPatcher makes it look easy, but it really is not. If you ever do a compare between a firmware with OP strat swaps with the stock firmware, you're going to see a lot of changed bytes in a lot of non-obvious places (this is especially true for OP because OP strat changes are done by hijacking the firmware's strategy selection routines and not by copying-and-pasting neat table entries like on the NEC). Try patching some strat changes in the BS0K firmware with OP and then apply the exact same patches to the BS41 firmware. And look at the bytes changed for the BS0K patch and the bytes changed for the BS41 patch--they're completely different... different locations, different number of bytes change, different changes, etc. So in that respect, Liggy is right in a post that he made some time ago: it's not just a matter of flipping a byte here and there. OP is, in essense, disassembling the firmware, figuring out exactly what is being done, determining where to patch, and then determining how to patch. This is not a trivial matter, and is something that, frankly, can't be easily taught if someone doesn't know disassembly. And even with disassembly knowledge, it's not always easy (despite having written in a few forms of assembly a little while ago, I wouldn't have gotten OP to where it is today without guidance from CK).

2/ Patching can also be a dangerous sport. You patch wrong, and you can kill a drive. It's easy to spot mistakes if you are a human, but for a computer program to know "oh, this isn't good" is more difficult, and I would not have released OP if I was not convinced that it was reasonably capable of safeguarding against mispatches (and so far, this has not been a problem). On the other hand, when I patch the LiteOn DVD-ROM firmwares, I also use a patching tool (with up to over 100 bytes in various different locations to patch for each firmware, I don't really want to do it by hand), but the patching tool is much more primitive (for one, it's command-line) and, unlike OP, is unable to check to make sure that the patch is good--I do the verification manually. This is why this tool has never been released and why I just resort to releasing patched firmwares in different flavors (thank goodness for solid RAR) instead of making a tool to let people fiddle around.

If a tool is being withheld from the public because of this, I think it's completely understandable. But if the tool is safe, I think that it should be released. Or if the tool is unsafe, but someone who knows what they're doing (e.g., another patcher), I think that it would be good for the sake of spreading knowledge (after all, this is what TDB does a lot).

3/ Finally, although I used to do this way back when, I no longer announce exactly what bytes get changed in the patches. Because it's not really meaningful to anyone unless someone knows how to disassemble a firmware and look at a disassembled firmware. And if they know how to do that, then they shouldn't need to be told what got changed 'cuz a simple fc or diff would do.

And here.

http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=29766

And here.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=115980

Originally, I did not want to post in this thread, as it doesn't really affect me. All the patches I'm interested in (which is only RPC1) are already available, I don't need crossflashing or overspeeding media. But... I can't hold back anymore. It annoys me how this turned into a fight over releasing patchtools or not, instead of pointing out a very valid point, like the original poster did.

If you read the first post in this thread, you might notice that the poster did NOT ask for any kind of tools to be released. He asked patchers to share information about their patches, instead of just posting the patched binaries. The replies, however, almost immediately centered around some people's patchtools. It's fine if Liggy/Quikee/whoever don't want to release their tools. They're theirs, after all. Live with it. Bad luck.

But now back to the original point of this thread: "Knowledge is Power" or "Why don't you share your knowledge, it won't hurt you". I got to know CDFreaks as a more open forum in the past - unlike some other forum that deleted posts of more technical nature to make sure the "insider info" is kept inside their elite circle. Unfortunately, the openness of this forum seems to be changing now with some people who did figure out patching techniques. Do they want to keep the "fame" to themselves or something? I can only guess, since I never understood what kind of "fame" there can lie behind a mere forum nick. Or who knows, maybe there's already some elite non-public patchers-only area here as well? In that case, I'd take back everything I said about openness.

I'm sure that a lot of people want to try their own luck patching firmwares, and I'm also sure that 90% of them would immediately forget the idea if they knew what is involved, what they'd need to learn and understand. But instead of giving them the info needed to start, so at least the remaining 10% won't have to figure everything out for themselves, some of you are getting arrogant and post out-of-context hex dumps of write strategies (trying to protect your eliteness as "one of the few godly firmware patchers"?).

As for the information that IS already public, there isn't much, to my knowledge. There's the old XVI stuff, ie. the "how to patch" PDF and the disassembler sources, linked from the RPC1 forum's "Utilities" section, and there are a couple of posts on CDFreaks with a little info on NEC drives (e.g. the fact that they're using a H8 CPU and somewhere there's also the checksum calculation explained). I haven't searched a lot and only in the NEC forum, so there might be a bit more, but not much. If someone has links to threads, why not link them here?

Examples of useful info (non-exhaustive!) that NO ONE so far has published are memory maps of different drives, subroutine offsets for certain versions (e.g. RPC2 check, crossflash-blocker routines etc.), disassembled patch examples and so on. Instead, all we get, as mentioned above, are pre-patched binaries. This is great for the "wanna-burn-more-coasters-even-faster" crowd, but useless for people who are interested in the technical details - unless they go and diff the patched binary against the original binary, disassemble both and so on. Why make it so complicated? Post your findings, not only your finished patches!

Bottom line, whoever wants to start firmware patching will have to figure out almost everything on his own. Which is stupid, as the information is known - why do the same work for the Nth time? That's at the very least counter-productive.

No one is asking for a detailed "patch guide". If you patchers release info on your patches, no one is expecting you to publish a "click here, click there" guide for everyone. The "crowd" is pleased with pre-patched doubleclick-to-flash binaries. But there is a handful of people who are interested in more technical details, so why not give them those?

I don't know how much of that previous post is directed at me and how much of it is directed at others. But I do give out (and have given out) the source code to OP... for those who approach me privately and who also can demonstrate that they can actually understand and make use of the source code (which I give out in lieu of an explanation because the source code for the patching process is an explanation in itself).

Patching is much more than knowing how to use a hex editor. It's knowing how to use a hex editor and understanding what bytes your're changing and why. And for most people, there is no need give give them the gory details because they won't be able to make use of them. And for those who do know how to make use of them, there are other, more suitable forms of communication. When I consulted with TDB many months ago when I first started patching, I didn't post in a thread asking for all the details because it's something that most people won't have much use for and it would really be very much out of place. Instead, I PMed and e-mailed them. And anyone else who feels that they have the know-how to contribute should also be able to understand that these forums are not appropriate places for that kind of discussion simply because of the audience that these forums cater to. If you really are that talented, drop an e-mail to the various patchers, like >NIL:, TDB, TCG, Liggy, etc., and I'm sure that you'd probably get a very warm response.

A handful as opposed to the millions of users CDFreaks targets.

Mr.Shine, please post information that can be posted here if you have something of use to anyone. You can also always join CDFreaks moderater/editor team if you prove to be helpful. Just do what you can. Most people don't even do what they can with ease.

Please patch LG firmwares and Samsung firmwares if you know how and let us have the opportunity to work with you testing media. I don't know the how-to but I can make use of several drives and several hundreds of media if needs be to help the work.