Tag Archives: sansa fuze

Rockbox

More fresh Rockbox targets

I’ve not mentioned anything about developments on new Rockbox targets lately, so I thought I’d do a little run-down of the targets that seem to have momentum right now:

Toshiba Gigabeat S – quite similar to the Zune hw-wise but not entirely. This already runs Rockbox pretty good and even has music playback. Still not offered for download and treated as “supported” since there’s currently no user-friendly installer method, especially on Windows. Freescale i.MX31L equipped.

Philips GoGear SA9200 – PortalPlayer based thing with the same SoC as the Sansa e200 v1 series and uses mi4 like many other PP targets.

Creative Zen Vision:M – Still a rough install method that requires you to rip out the harddrive, insert it into another computer, wipe the FS and replace it with FAT and then it still has no music playback… but there’s a video showing how it looks!

SanDisk Sansa “v2 series” – The recent architectural upgrade by SanDisk is quite similar over a range of models (e200 v2, c200 v2, m200 v2, Clip, Fuze etc) and recently there have been lots of new info creeping up in the forum thread, offering hope we might soon see a proper “first shot” at flashing a modified firmware.

SanDisk Sansa C100 – one of them TCC based ports that use tcctool to download code and execute in RAM only during a trial period, and that’s indeed a convenient way!

SanDisk Sansa M200 (v1) – very similar to the C100 model hw-wise, tcctool etc. There’s a working LCD driver but no NAND one…

Cowon D2 – I mentioned it before, but it is worth repeating since there is still work going on. Touch screen code has been committed and it seems quite useful at this point. No music playback yet and there’s something shaky with the NAND driver I believe.

I probably missed some model(s) (like I didn’t repeat the Meizu M6 work), but I think the picture is clear anyway: there have been some frantic action in the Rockbox camp lately and it shows that we have a large number of people who enjoy bringing Rockbox to even more targets…

Electronics, Rockbox

Sansa Fuze AMS reuse

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Anythingbutipod.com published a Sansa Fuze disassembly today and allow me to offer a visual comparison of the SanDisk-branded main chips in the Sansa Fuze (top) compared to the one in the Sansa e280 v2 (bottom):

Sansa Fuze chip branded SanDisk

SanDisk marked chip, an AMS AS3525

And since we know the e200v2 one is an AS3525, there is little doubt that the Fuze one is as well. Of course we can confirm this for real once we get our hands on a firmware update file for the Fuze – I’m not aware of the existence of any yet at least.

So where does this put the Fuze Rockbox-wise? About at the same position all the other “Sansa v2 architecture” targets: we basically know the firmware file format, we have data sheet for the AS3525 but there aren’t any particular efforts going on and we don’t know if they have any means to recover from being flashed with a broken firmware!

Update: because some less intelligent people decided that facts I wrote in this article back in 2008 would still be the truth several years later, I urge you all you check the date for things your read on the internets. And in this particular case, Rockbox runs very good these days on several SanDisk players that use the AMS chipsets. See the http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaAMS page for details