http://www.rockbox.org/ is a portable music player software/firmware
In Rockbox we’ve seen the gcc 4.2.x series introduce warnings on C code that really is perfectly fine, and also compiles warning-less on all other versions of gcc. (We use the 4.2.x series in Rockbox only for the simulator, built for running on host.)
In the linux-mips project, they’ve found gcc 4.2.2 to not even be able to build their kernel…It has been suggested that perhaps the best thing is to just skip to 4.3. Bugzilla entry.
MrH updated his Semi-Independent DMA Interface docs for the PortalPlayer PP5024, now at 0.6.
USB in Rockbox land was originally a matter of supporting the USB bridge chips in the first targets we supported (the Archos ones, the irivers and the iAudios).
Since the USB stacks moved into pure software in the used soc chips, Rockbox has (unfortunately) relied on the original firmwares (the so called OF) to provide USB support so that host computers can access the players.
One of the projects in the Google Summer of Code 2007 for Rockbox was to introduce a USB stack and offer native USB support for Rockbox, at least on the PortalPlayer-based targets. These targets were selected because the PortalPlayer chips have been found to have a USB set that is next to identical to the one used in the Freescale i.MX31 and that is fully documented online. Christian Gmeiner took this project to state where it partially works, but not enough to be actually useful to any Rockbox user. Christian’s code was largely based on USB code from the Linux kernel.
Now, long time Rockbox hacker Björn Stenberg enters the stage. Being one of the (original) core guys, he has a firm believe in KISS and as such he has started over on a brand new USB stack implementation that is meant to replace Christian’s and to be smaller, less complicated and quite possibly end up actually working! Björn once wrote the ISD200 support in the USB stack for Linux, so he has been in this neighborhood before…
The GSOC (Google Summer of Code) guys are now trying to identify all the mentors on this pic, so if you see yourself or someone else you know, do step forward and I’ll arrange for that name to get added to the wiki for this purpose – which I assume will be used to produce an annotated picture later on.
Update: use the pic with numbers and lines to better specify exact persons.
Microsoft hasn’t given in yet it seems, as they announced their updated Zunes yesterday. They’re available as 4 or 8GB flash and a 80GB hdd version, and these ones are claimed to play more movie formats (like h.264 and MPEG-4) and they actually seem to be capable of using the wifi for things like syncing music etc.
The zune music is also said to go DRM-free… All in all, I’d say they seem to really make an effort to be a serious iPod alternative.
Anyway, there hasn’t of course been any serious dissect of these new Zunes yet but given how their earlier models were made it seems unlikely that they will attract any larger crowds of eager hackers. They also seem to have applied a fair amount of cryptography, another Apple-like approach, so it is hard to put a replacement firmware on it.
The guys in the Zune Linux project have really no clues about what hacking these things require, and their early chatter on deciding what logo to use and what “distro” to base their work on have just been hilarious jokes. I don’t expect this new set of models to change this situation in any significant way.
I’m not aware of any known skilled (Rockbox) hacker having a go at Zune. The old Zune models are however quite similar (but not identical) hardware wise to the Toshiba Gigabeat S models, for which there is a Rockbox port in the works (as I’ve mentioned before).
We’re slowly building a team and effort in the Rockbox project to make a port to the Cowon iAudio 7 player.
It’s a 60 gram 4/8/16 GB flash player with a 1.3″ 160×128 TFT LCD, FM tuner, Telechips TCC771 MCU and a bunch of chips familiar to us from other existing Rockbox ports.
TMM already bricked his first player…
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There’s a bunch of eager hackers hanging out in the Rockbox forums, working on getting a Rockbox port for the Dell DJ going.
This player has a monochrome LCD at 160×104, features the dreaded TMS320 series MCU and comes with up to 20GB hard drive.
MrH mailed me a document describing his latest research on the PP5024 memory controller, and I figure we have reasons to believe that the other chips in the PP family might be similar. He did the work by running test programs and disassembling the Sansa firmware.
Of course, I keep the collected e200 details from MrH on my Sansa e200 page.
The other day while I was browsing the endless stream of pointless articles about iPhone this and iPhone that, I fell over this slashdot article that mentioned the US Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act which basically says that a company cannot void a warranty just because the user has tampered with its software if the company cannot prove that the alternative software is to blame for the failure.
Of course I’m not a lawyer or even in the US, but it certainly seems to be something that should apply for quite a few Rockbox users who have feared returning broken units to manufacturers with the Rockbox installation left intact. (Both Archos and iriver are known to have refused to service such players – but I guess neither of those cases actually were in the US with US customers.)
It does however require that there is an existing written warranty in the first place.
And then I figure the struggle for a mere single human being to fight against one of these companies claiming that Rockbox isn’t to blame could be more than just a little intimidating and probably just won’t happen…
I thought that I’d just complete my recent series of talking about (possible) upcoming Rockbox ports, even though the guys working on this already have been in progress for a while.
This target is quite different than the (already supported) Gigabeat F and X series, and is in fact more like a Zune (claimed to be based on this hardware).
Anyway, Gigabeat S has a 530MHz CPU with FPU, 2.4″ 320×240 LCD, 30 or 60GB disk and it runs a Windows(!) edition.
As all Gigabeat players, this is notoriously hard to get your hands on, especially in Europe.
