7 ms·

I bought an Alesis QS8.1 super cheap in perfect condition (was a top grade digital piano/synth in the 90s). and then i realized that ALL of the software (which

I bought an Alesis QS8.1 super cheap in perfect condition (was a top grade digital piano/synth in the 90s). and then i realized that ALL of the software (which i collected from defunct websites and archived on github) related to it was ancient and after a while of getting tired of using WINE every single time i decided i wanted a cross platform modern equivalent that did everything that several of these different programs did (plus break out some stuff that was now potentially possible with modern computer) i thought it would be extremely hard because the computer to synth communication is pretty much only via sysex commands (of which the actual wave file encoding protocol was undocumented) Claude walked me through examining the some of the original software in GHIDRA, and I had a working demo that night.....now im just playing with adding new features to it.

djmips 3mo ago
That's fantastic. Did you use a Ghidra MCP server? It's kind of magical huh?
- alright2565 3mo ago
  I've done a similar sort of thing with my camera lens' firmware updater just out of curiosity, and I didn't use any kind of MCP. It's able to write an automated script using the Ghirda API to decompile the program just fine, and then code exploration can be done by reading the code. Claude needs good variable names a lot less than humans do, so renaming/typedefing doesn't seem to be as necessary.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
notagoodidea 3mo ago
I would be interested to learn a bit more on the how after reading also [0] and the worlk done on patching the Ableton Move firmware with the Schwung [1]. Slightly different but there is an increasing amount of work done on either old hardware and new one exploring patching, swapping or developing new firmware from scratch thanks to LLM/GenAI currently. [0] https://mforney.org/blog/2026-05-28-patching-my-guitar-amps-firmware.html https://mforney.org/blog/2026-05-28-patching-my-guitar-amps-... [1] https://schwung.dev https://schwung.dev
- tomduncalf 3mo ago
  Schwung is great. See also the recent new firmware for the Elektron Monomachine (old unsupported hardware) created using LLMs
itomato 3mo ago
While not the "oh shit" moment, the wave has the same shape. I have an DigiTech GNX3000 effects pedal board - a digital modeling "workstation" that needs the aged Windows native software or Gdigi to make the most of. At best, the experience with gdigi was passable; raw access to the patches and controls, the ability to control it from the laptop, etc. In an hour or so, I had a functionally superior webmidi version up and running in Vercel using their v0 code. It kicked off a wave of subscriptions and referral chasing. I made it a template - because there are so many gnx3k users out there: https://v0.app/templates/digitech-gnx3000-sysex-tool-GC5LzXA5dXt https://v0.app/templates/digitech-gnx3000-sysex-tool-GC5LzXA...
jsharf 3mo ago
Related story, while applying a firmware update to my Kawai CA49 piano, I bricked it due to flashing the wrong file (The process was broken, and I got desperate and tried something stupid, which bricked the piano). Claude walked me through looking for signs of life, and since OTA from the phone app wasn't working for me, it downloaded the Kawai Android APK, decompiled the Java, figured out the hardcoded key used for encrypting the firmware update. Extracted the piano firmware update, decrypted it, and then wrote a flashing script to program the piano from my laptop via bluetooth. My piano was back to working within an hour.
- Galus 3mo ago
  That's sick.
- jazzyjackson 3mo ago
  Baller
- idiotsecant 3mo ago
  I can't imagine where we are headed. You understand every step of what it did and can appreciate the complexity but it'll only take a few generations for this to become something like magic to the tech priests beseeching the machine spirits for blessings
  - Flere-Imsaho 3mo ago
    I'm not convinced that's where we are heading. LLMs are really good at explaining things ("explain to me like I'm a 5 year old").
    - baq 3mo ago
      Imagine someone in a position of power mandating that LLMs should not be good teachers.
      - zx8080 3mo ago
zellyn 3mo ago
I had that keyboard! I actually really like the piano-ish touch. I remember being sad though, when I realized they’d crammed all the sounds into I think 16MB (or was it 8?) and realizing how bad that was even by the late 90s! I think I still have mine in the garage somewhere… good times!
- richardfey 3mo ago
  You mean bad because they could have used a larger memory module and thus higher resolution sound samples?
- claytongulick 3mo ago
  I loved mine. Had it since the 90s, working perfectly. One day a few years ago my dad came by and was admiring it (it was a QS8) and asked to borrow it so he could play piano again. I, of course, said sure, but was feeling a little salty about it inside, because I wanted it to play, that's why I had it all set up. Anyway, about a year went by and I asked him about it to see if he was done with it. He said "oh that thing? I gave that away, was just taking up space" -.-
gyomu 3mo ago
Yes, those tools are extremely good at reverse engineering. With a bit of know how, it is now trivial to reverse engineer any protocol or crack any software, often in a matter of hours or less. A lot of people in the industry have vested interests in this not being discussed openly so you don't hear too much about it, but the implications are huge.
- j-conn 3mo ago
  What are some of the implications? Where does widely available mythos-level hacking lead? By people with a vested interest, do you mean non-cloud software vendors?
  - aero142 3mo ago
    Software that had a data moat because it was hard to integrate with or migrate off of will have that moat disappear. A web site is a client now. Building data migration too for all of you competitors is easier now.
    - StanAngeloff 3mo ago
      One of the many SaaS products we use at Day Job chose to gatekeep its MCP behind an enterprise plan. A brief Claude Code session later and a better, more feature-full MCP than the official was reverse-engineered from internal APIs by Opus.
    - SyneRyder 3mo ago
      I've just had a SaaS that I use decide to implement a 2.4x price increase. I reacted instead by taking screenshots of every page of the SaaS, downloading their API docs, exporting what data I could, and asking Claude to build a self-hosted clone based just on those files. I had a read-only version of my entire data history completed in a single evening. Even at Opus API rates, it cost me less than half the price of a single annual seat.
      - grepfru_it 3mo ago
skhameneh 3mo ago
Hey so... mind sharing findings? I have a QS8 :)
NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago
>Claude walked me through examining the some of the original software in GHIDRA, I wanted to be able to decrypt the files on The Complete New Yorker magazine DVDs. The old software was WinXP only, and crashed by the time you turned to page 3 or 4. It walked me through using Ghidra on the relevant dll, mapped out how it was using Blowfish, what the credentials were that it was passing, and re-implemented all of that in a python script. Now all the files are in plain pdf. Right now, it's helping me write an extension to the mkv specification for embedded scripts and modify VLC to be conformant, so I can watch Black Mirror Bandersnatch. Already have a buggy implementation, about 3 days in. I've also had it add BEP 46 mutable torrent functionality to Transmission (and to some extent, to the WebTorrent library). These are all well beyond my abilities to do casually, and probably beyond my ability to do even if I spent the next 18 months doing nothing by grinding away at it. I only replied because I thought it curious that Claude apparently favors Ghidra.
- peterstjohn 3mo ago
  Ooooh, you don't happen to have the code for the New Yorker decryption in a form you could send, do you? Or put up on github or even just give me the starting prompt…
  - peterstjohn 3mo ago
    Okay, a couple of hours later…thanks for the hint as that's fucking dark magic ;) and I now have access to the entire New Yorker again after around 15 years :)
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago
      Since I think you'll find the one for Rolling Stone and Playboy, but not The New Yorker (I might be one of the few that has this or something like it)... https://gist.github.com/NoMoreNicksLeft/d3a4a59c7b4de0cdef1e26695606e51c https://gist.github.com/NoMoreNicksLeft/d3a4a59c7b4de0cdef1e... I'll have a more proper github repo at some point, but there are bugs I was working through. Some issues are bloated up ridiculously... a 9mb djvu file shouldn't become a 110mb pdf. Most issues will work well though. Hope it helps.
mattmanser 3mo ago
With stuff like this, do you honestly not feel that you've probably been tricked and that someone else actually did this? Don't get me wrong, I think AI can do some surprising things, but with stuff like this, often it just stole the code and the steps without attribution, it didn't figure it out. There'll probably be a blog post detailing exactly how to do this somewhere and Claude just copied the steps and code. And worse, Google search would have found it 10 years ago, but Google search today would claim there are no results? I think incredibly specific stuff like this often won't pass the 'did Claude just steal this?' test when you dig into it.
- ezconnect 3mo ago
  It was probably done on a foreign language on an archived forum. Claude is the improvement of the internet search box.
  - ozim 3mo ago
    I take it…. Improvement over all the assholes that tell you „just google it” after you spent two days hitting the wall.
- tonyarkles 3mo ago
  I appreciate where you’re coming from but no, I don’t believe so. I have had Claude do some incredible reverse engineering on very proprietary niche firmware blobs that aren’t generally available to the public. One of the really interesting reasons why I don’t believe that it’s simply regurgitation but rather iterative novel synthesis is because of the dead ends and blind alleys that led to success. It feels a lot more like “Claude has read every tutorial on Ghidra and Radare2, and has memorized the ARM architecture and datasheets for all of these microcontrollers”. Misidentifying, say, which subfamily of processors it is based on the IVT, only to course correct when I give it the VID/PID of the device booted into DFU mode. One piece of gear, Claude found a hidden and highly useful diagnostic screen. This took a few iterations too. It found the existence of it based on just running “strings” against the firmware image but needed a few rounds of me going “I tried what you suggested but this is what happened instead”. Searching Google, DuckDuckGo, and GitHub for any of the strings that were on that screen or any of the named constants associated with that screen in reverse engineered source led to exactly zero hits. More entertaining, Claude and I together also nailed down the source of a PTP synchronization bug in a piece of equipment a few months ago using the main UI .exe (written in pascal, of course), an ARM Linux image from the real-time controller in the box, and some pcaps from it interacting with other devices. The vendor released a patch a few days ago, without me having reported the bug.

djmips 3mo ago

That's fantastic. Did you use a Ghidra MCP server? It's kind of magical huh?

alright2565 3mo ago
I've done a similar sort of thing with my camera lens' firmware updater just out of curiosity, and I didn't use any kind of MCP. It's able to write an automated script using the Ghirda API to decompile the program just fine, and then code exploration can be done by reading the code. Claude needs good variable names a lot less than humans do, so renaming/typedefing doesn't seem to be as necessary.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

notagoodidea 3mo ago

I would be interested to learn a bit more on the how after reading also [0] and the worlk done on patching the Ableton Move firmware with the Schwung [1]. Slightly different but there is an increasing amount of work done on either old hardware and new one exploring patching, swapping or developing new firmware from scratch thanks to LLM/GenAI currently. [0] https://mforney.org/blog/2026-05-28-patching-my-guitar-amps-firmware.html https://mforney.org/blog/2026-05-28-patching-my-guitar-amps-... [1] https://schwung.dev https://schwung.dev

tomduncalf 3mo ago
Schwung is great. See also the recent new firmware for the Elektron Monomachine (old unsupported hardware) created using LLMs

itomato 3mo ago

While not the "oh shit" moment, the wave has the same shape. I have an DigiTech GNX3000 effects pedal board - a digital modeling "workstation" that needs the aged Windows native software or Gdigi to make the most of. At best, the experience with gdigi was passable; raw access to the patches and controls, the ability to control it from the laptop, etc. In an hour or so, I had a functionally superior webmidi version up and running in Vercel using their v0 code. It kicked off a wave of subscriptions and referral chasing. I made it a template - because there are so many gnx3k users out there: https://v0.app/templates/digitech-gnx3000-sysex-tool-GC5LzXA5dXt https://v0.app/templates/digitech-gnx3000-sysex-tool-GC5LzXA...

jsharf 3mo ago

Related story, while applying a firmware update to my Kawai CA49 piano, I bricked it due to flashing the wrong file (The process was broken, and I got desperate and tried something stupid, which bricked the piano). Claude walked me through looking for signs of life, and since OTA from the phone app wasn't working for me, it downloaded the Kawai Android APK, decompiled the Java, figured out the hardcoded key used for encrypting the firmware update. Extracted the piano firmware update, decrypted it, and then wrote a flashing script to program the piano from my laptop via bluetooth. My piano was back to working within an hour.

Galus 3mo ago
That's sick.
jazzyjackson 3mo ago
Baller
idiotsecant 3mo ago
I can't imagine where we are headed. You understand every step of what it did and can appreciate the complexity but it'll only take a few generations for this to become something like magic to the tech priests beseeching the machine spirits for blessings
- Flere-Imsaho 3mo ago
  I'm not convinced that's where we are heading. LLMs are really good at explaining things ("explain to me like I'm a 5 year old").
  - baq 3mo ago
    Imagine someone in a position of power mandating that LLMs should not be good teachers.
    - zx8080 3mo ago

zellyn 3mo ago

I had that keyboard! I actually really like the piano-ish touch. I remember being sad though, when I realized they’d crammed all the sounds into I think 16MB (or was it 8?) and realizing how bad that was even by the late 90s! I think I still have mine in the garage somewhere… good times!

richardfey 3mo ago
You mean bad because they could have used a larger memory module and thus higher resolution sound samples?
claytongulick 3mo ago
I loved mine. Had it since the 90s, working perfectly. One day a few years ago my dad came by and was admiring it (it was a QS8) and asked to borrow it so he could play piano again. I, of course, said sure, but was feeling a little salty about it inside, because I wanted it to play, that's why I had it all set up. Anyway, about a year went by and I asked him about it to see if he was done with it. He said "oh that thing? I gave that away, was just taking up space" -.-

gyomu 3mo ago

Yes, those tools are extremely good at reverse engineering. With a bit of know how, it is now trivial to reverse engineer any protocol or crack any software, often in a matter of hours or less. A lot of people in the industry have vested interests in this not being discussed openly so you don't hear too much about it, but the implications are huge.

j-conn 3mo ago
What are some of the implications? Where does widely available mythos-level hacking lead? By people with a vested interest, do you mean non-cloud software vendors?
- aero142 3mo ago
  Software that had a data moat because it was hard to integrate with or migrate off of will have that moat disappear. A web site is a client now. Building data migration too for all of you competitors is easier now.
  - StanAngeloff 3mo ago
    One of the many SaaS products we use at Day Job chose to gatekeep its MCP behind an enterprise plan. A brief Claude Code session later and a better, more feature-full MCP than the official was reverse-engineered from internal APIs by Opus.
  - SyneRyder 3mo ago
    I've just had a SaaS that I use decide to implement a 2.4x price increase. I reacted instead by taking screenshots of every page of the SaaS, downloading their API docs, exporting what data I could, and asking Claude to build a self-hosted clone based just on those files. I had a read-only version of my entire data history completed in a single evening. Even at Opus API rates, it cost me less than half the price of a single annual seat.
    - grepfru_it 3mo ago

skhameneh 3mo ago

Hey so... mind sharing findings? I have a QS8 :)

NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago

>Claude walked me through examining the some of the original software in GHIDRA, I wanted to be able to decrypt the files on The Complete New Yorker magazine DVDs. The old software was WinXP only, and crashed by the time you turned to page 3 or 4. It walked me through using Ghidra on the relevant dll, mapped out how it was using Blowfish, what the credentials were that it was passing, and re-implemented all of that in a python script. Now all the files are in plain pdf. Right now, it's helping me write an extension to the mkv specification for embedded scripts and modify VLC to be conformant, so I can watch Black Mirror Bandersnatch. Already have a buggy implementation, about 3 days in. I've also had it add BEP 46 mutable torrent functionality to Transmission (and to some extent, to the WebTorrent library). These are all well beyond my abilities to do casually, and probably beyond my ability to do even if I spent the next 18 months doing nothing by grinding away at it. I only replied because I thought it curious that Claude apparently favors Ghidra.

peterstjohn 3mo ago
Ooooh, you don't happen to have the code for the New Yorker decryption in a form you could send, do you? Or put up on github or even just give me the starting prompt…
- peterstjohn 3mo ago
  Okay, a couple of hours later…thanks for the hint as that's fucking dark magic ;) and I now have access to the entire New Yorker again after around 15 years :)
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago
    Since I think you'll find the one for Rolling Stone and Playboy, but not The New Yorker (I might be one of the few that has this or something like it)... https://gist.github.com/NoMoreNicksLeft/d3a4a59c7b4de0cdef1e26695606e51c https://gist.github.com/NoMoreNicksLeft/d3a4a59c7b4de0cdef1e... I'll have a more proper github repo at some point, but there are bugs I was working through. Some issues are bloated up ridiculously... a 9mb djvu file shouldn't become a 110mb pdf. Most issues will work well though. Hope it helps.

mattmanser 3mo ago

With stuff like this, do you honestly not feel that you've probably been tricked and that someone else actually did this? Don't get me wrong, I think AI can do some surprising things, but with stuff like this, often it just stole the code and the steps without attribution, it didn't figure it out. There'll probably be a blog post detailing exactly how to do this somewhere and Claude just copied the steps and code. And worse, Google search would have found it 10 years ago, but Google search today would claim there are no results? I think incredibly specific stuff like this often won't pass the 'did Claude just steal this?' test when you dig into it.

ezconnect 3mo ago
It was probably done on a foreign language on an archived forum. Claude is the improvement of the internet search box.
- ozim 3mo ago
  I take it…. Improvement over all the assholes that tell you „just google it” after you spent two days hitting the wall.
tonyarkles 3mo ago
I appreciate where you’re coming from but no, I don’t believe so. I have had Claude do some incredible reverse engineering on very proprietary niche firmware blobs that aren’t generally available to the public. One of the really interesting reasons why I don’t believe that it’s simply regurgitation but rather iterative novel synthesis is because of the dead ends and blind alleys that led to success. It feels a lot more like “Claude has read every tutorial on Ghidra and Radare2, and has memorized the ARM architecture and datasheets for all of these microcontrollers”. Misidentifying, say, which subfamily of processors it is based on the IVT, only to course correct when I give it the VID/PID of the device booted into DFU mode. One piece of gear, Claude found a hidden and highly useful diagnostic screen. This took a few iterations too. It found the existence of it based on just running “strings” against the firmware image but needed a few rounds of me going “I tried what you suggested but this is what happened instead”. Searching Google, DuckDuckGo, and GitHub for any of the strings that were on that screen or any of the named constants associated with that screen in reverse engineered source led to exactly zero hits. More entertaining, Claude and I together also nailed down the source of a PTP synchronization bug in a piece of equipment a few months ago using the main UI .exe (written in pascal, of course), an ARM Linux image from the real-time controller in the box, and some pcaps from it interacting with other devices. The vendor released a patch a few days ago, without me having reported the bug.