[Windows Mobile Development and Hacking General] vijay555:
[Update Nov 7: Universal too! Use VJLumosLite]

All,

If you follow this thread you’ll see discussion of the bizarre behaviour of the Magician’s screen when you start the camera; the screen momentarily goes whiter than white, nay, SuperBright. However, this level of brightness has been hidden from us in normal use.

I have developed a technique for using this SuperBright mode. I’m not too proud of it, because it’s an “ugly hack”, meaning a bit of a cheat. The ideal way to do this would be to reverse engineer the camera program, camera driver or screen driver and find out how it does this. I didn’t do this. I basically trick the system into thinking the camera is always running, hence always SuperBright.

Now, it basically works. However, and I cannot stress this enough, IT IS DANGEROUS.

I don’t know the effect of running your screen so bright for prolonged periods. However, it’s basically just enabling the camera, so if the camera works SuperBright safely, I guess this should too.

The SuperBright mode can ONLY be achieved once per soft reset. So that means, use it once, and then when you power off the Magician it will go back to normal brightness again. If you try to run your camera again, it WILL HARD RESET the Magician. Let me say that again. Hard Reset. Not soft. So take a backup before use, and use wisely, and say no to drugs. To reenable SuperBright you will have to soft reset again.

VJLumos cannot (hopefully) be shut down after it’s been run, to remind you that you’ve run it once so don’t be a fool and run the camera again. Or it will hard reset your phone. Did I mention this?

VJLumos will show you a warning on startup. This can be optionally overridden by starting the program with a command line “silent”, eg

“vjlumos.exe silent”

I reiterate. I did not want to release this program because it is an ugly hack, works only once per soft reset and can hard reset your Magician. But I’ve been asked to release it, so caveat emptor.

This program took quite a while to develop and release, so if you want to express thanks or monetary vengefulness, please feel free to send a donation to my “Buy Vijay a WM5 device so he can keep pumping out the goods” campaign.

I need to buy a WM5 device to finish developing a ton of good stuff I can’t share with you guys yet. However, my Magician’s only a few months old and my better half won’t let me spend more cash now, so if I save up, you guys will reap the rewards. My stuff will generally be free or nearly free, particularly for XDA forum users. Stay tuned for more goodies on show shortly.

Click here to make a donation. :wink:

Guys, if you use this, successfully or not, please post. I need to keep track of how it works.

Download VJLumos.exe

Update - Lite version

If the automatic version (above) doesn't work for you, please try the "lite" version. To use this one:

1. Place a shortcut to VJLumosLite in your startmenu (no installer included for now).

2. Start the camera.

3. Click the tools option (second icon in the bottom right corner).

4. Click the tools menu.

5. Choose Adjust...

6. Now go to your startmenu and run VJLumosLite.

7. Hopefully after a few seconds you'll return to the today screen in SuperBright mode.

8. If you get an error message, please PM me with details of your setup.

Download VJLumosLite.exe

Further update, camera.exe

It appears that there are different versions of the camera.exe program on our phones. I'm using ROM 1.12. If you have incompatibilies, you can download the camera.exe from my ROM here. Install it in your \windows\ folder. If there are any copyright issues I'll take it down.

V

PS Did I mention the hard reset? Don’t run the camera again after VJLumos. And backup BEFORE first use in case you forget.

PPS Oh, and if you find yourself in a strange screen with a cross on it, press hangup (the red key) or somehow go back to Today screen.

PPPS I don't recommend putting this in your startup folder. It needs to play around with the camera, and your startup may be slow, causing problems with interacting with it.