These days there are emulators for all the great consoles of yesteryear, as well as old retrocomputers and arcade machines and so much else to boot. Now, though, a particularly popular MP3 player has an emulator of its own—by the name of clicky!
The name is a reference to the click wheel of the venerable Apple iPod, and as you might imagine, that’s precisely what clicky is built to emulate. [daniel5151] started the project as a neat technical challenge, following on from earlier work he’s done in the NES emulation space. The iPod is a bit of a difficult prospect to emulate, being very much a closed-source device that is very poorly documented in the public space. There are few projects to look to for help, since a complete open-source iPod emulator doesn’t already exist; however, various alternative firmware projects have offered a guiding light.
For now, clicky can boot into RetailOS, which is what you would have used on an iPod you bought from the factory. It can also run Rockbox and iPodLinux, though for now, running the Apple Diagnostics program is not yet achievable. Plenty of functionality still isn’t implemented, either, like USB communication or even audio, which was the iPod’s whole raison d’être. Still, you can play some Brick Breaker like it’s 2006 if you’ve been missing it badly.
We see all kinds of emulators around these parts; this 60 FPS NES emulator running on a microcontroller was a particularly impressive recent effort. If you’re cooking up your own emulators for unique platforms, or unique emulators for non-unique platforms, let us know on the tipsline!
What does this run on?
“Note: clicky is primarily developed and tested on Linux, though it is being written with cross-platform support in mind. At some point, I do intend to set up a CI to ensure clicky compiles on Windows/macOS, but until that point, please file an issue if clicky doesn’t compile on your system.”
https://github.com/daniel5151/clicky/blob/master/docs/QUICKSTART.md
In danger of letting the cat out of the bag, I’m bringing an iPod SAO to Supercon this year. That will not be an emulator though…
A SAO that’ll plug on a 30pin connector from an iPod? Can you link to the project?
When it comes down to Apple vs PC vs Android, I’ve always gone with PC.
I have little interest in modern day Apple products, but, the original Apple mp3 players were great.
Their hardware was Amazing, their battery life was fantastic and they included actual physical buttons and even a headphone jack!
The one thing that I hated about them was their software platform needed to upload music to them that roped you into a iTunes account.
Every single MP3 player I have ever owned is beyond worn out at this point unfortunately, to include the few Apple mp3 players as well.
Maybe someday I’ll try building my own MP3 player with a raspberry pi zero or maybe something from the ESP32 platform.
You should check this out : https://www.crowdsupply.com/cool-tech-zone/tangara
imagine emulating an ipod to run its stock os with its kill code instead of rockbox.
kill code?
The original iPod doesn’t have a kill code. Only the later Touch version could be locked but that was a choice. Although I have had several Rockbox iPod’s, the official firmware was still very well made. I only installed Rockbox because it was fun to do so, with the options to play games on the iPod so I could take it places where I couldn’t take my Nokia 3210.
As the original author of clicky – super cool to see it featured here on Hackaday! I should note that I haven’t
As the original author of clicky – super cool to see it featured here on Hackaday! I should note that I haven’t actually been working on the project myself since ~2021, and the recent uptick in development has been entirely driven by the efforts of Jean Thomas (https://github.com/jeanthom)