alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
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-... [1] https://schwung.dev
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!
Hey so... mind sharing findings? I have a QS8 :)
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-GC5LzXA...
>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.
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.
That's fantastic. Did you use a Ghidra MCP server? It's kind of magical huh?
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.