George, I sent you a PM.
Mike, thank you!
I appreciate it.
I am sorry though for the delayed response. I had to go to an
emergency stop mode after having successfully reballed the FPGA (that took me almost half an hour of intensive focus, placing manually 256 individual solder balls on an FBGA chip pads before baking it with hot air), since Morpheus (the god of dreams) made me an offer I could not refuse at that time!
Well, I have also had in mind Alm's thoughts about making public a piece of firmware distributed in a selective manner by its IP owner.
The good part is that the created hacked files can be made public
for educational/testing purposes; the original firmware files cannot be made public without the consent of their legal owner. On the other hand, when something is released in the open, no one can be held account for "finding" it online, even though "internet anonymity" is yet another myth... So, "leaking" is a possible answer to the current problem, since I expect that people will also ask for the original new firmware to test it along with the hacked one; I know I would, as I have already done, above.
Anyway, all I will need from the new firmware file in order to hack it is a few specific bytes only! But, in order to test the hack properly, I will have to have access to a working unit loaded with the new firmware. At this time this does not seem to be possible for me because my DS1052 remains unbootable until I finish reversing its mainboard and solder the FPGA back in its place; and the FPGA is not on a socket in order to be removed at will. But I will be glad to try having the latest firmware hacked, since I think I know exactly what it takes to do it.
-George