It’s been a while since we’ve seen someone attempting to hack the Nikon firmware. A new GitHub has appeared named WonderLantern—a play on the MagicLantern hacks for Canon firmware—and it has started deploying open source documentation for their project, though it is in very early stages at this point. The WondernLantern project is still in very early stages, with one contributor currently probing and attempting to document what’s happening in the Z6 and Z7 firmware (version 3.80) by running it on a separate ARM-based system under observation.
Meanwhile, in China, apparently they’re using AI to try to hack Nikon firmware. If I’m reading the reports correctly (I don’t read Chinese, so have to rely upon translations), at least one user there has managed to bring a Log3G10 gamma curve (i.e. RED curve) to the Z6III, Z8, and Z9. The interesting aspect there is that Nikon’s firmware is signed (and checksummed), so if the screen images I’ve seen are to be believed, the Chinese have cracked how to re-sign firmware files.
I’ll point out that Nikon is different than Canon in regards to firmware. Canon’s firmware can and will run in camera memory, which means that you can save executable code on a storage card with Magic Hack and run camera modifications from that directly. Nikon’s firmware runs only internally, meaning that you have to create a replacement firmware update and install it on your camera. Nikon allows you to revert firmware, so as long as you don’t brick your camera, you can always go back to original firmware.
I’m not sure what will result from all this experimentation, but the reason I look at it is to better understand how Nikon is engineering things. Nikon treats EXPEED as a black box to which only they have the keys to use, and they almost never disclose anything about what’s going on in the box. The most coveted hack would be to “unlock” raw pre-capture, but from my experiments Nikon’s black box does pre-capture using video and I don’t believe the data chain they use would support straight video-to-raw conversion at the speeds they’re achieving (120 fps in the Z8/Z9). But you never know until you get verification, so I’ll keep looking at how others tackle trying to figure out how the black box works.