trag said:

Do you have a chip programmer.   I find that it's often easier to desolder the firmware chip (typically an 8-pin SOIC Serial Flash) and read/program it on a chip programmer than it is to do all the gymnastics to flash the card in a machine.  

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It's mostly just the navigating the forums and such where the magical firmware bundles and binaries are hidden. I know *why* they can't really make it too *easy* to find this stuff, since technically copying these hacked firmware bundles pretty easily qualifies as piracy, but... eh. I'll chalk my difficulties down to "insufficient motivation".