Rockbox

11 Articles

Giving A 6th Generation IPod A New Lease On Life

March 30, 2018 by 13 Comments

It can be disheartening when a favoured device begins to break-down. Afflicted by an all-but-dead battery and a fritzing-out hard drive, Redditor [cswimc] sensed the imminent doom creeping up on their 6th generation iPod, and responded by reviving and upgrading the decrepit device instead!

It’s no easy task to crack open one of these things, so they found themselves taking their time and carefully wedging the pry tool between the front and back covers, working their way around the exterior. Once separated, gingerly disconnecting the few ribbon cables allowed the iPod to be opened fully. From there, they turned to  swapping out the original hard drive for an iFlash dual SD card board — one of the cards turned out to be a dud, but 128GB is still a step up from 80GB — and a new 3000mAh battery. Combined with replacing the power-hungry HDD, the battery life has been overwhelmingly increased over the original’s 650mAh capacity!

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Sansa MP3 Player Runs Doom Unplayably

December 30, 2016 by 25 Comments

DOOM, is there anything it won’t run on? Yes. Your front lawn cannot currently play DOOM. Pretty much everything else can though. It’s a testament to the game’s impact on society that it gets ported to virtually every platform with buttons and a graphical screen.

This video shows a Sansa Clip playing DOOM, but it’s only just barely recognizable. The Sansa Clip has a single color screen, with yellow pixels at the top and grey for the rest of the screen. The monochrome display makes things hard to see, so a dithering technique is used to try and make things more visible. Unfortunately it’s not particularly effective, and it’s difficult to make out little more than the gun at the bottom of the screen.

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Reanimating A Philips HDD 1420 MP3 Player

September 26, 2014 by 7 Comments

[OiD] had a dusty, old, forgotten Philips HDD1420 GoGear mp3 player kicking around his place. As you can imagine, the battery was dead. He had no charger or connector for the thing, but decided to try to resurrect it anyway.

He thought it would simply be a matter of providing alternative power, but the GoGear wasn’t having it and insisted on being connected to a computer. He had some luck consulting Pinouts.ru and found Philips’ own device manager software, but it still wasn’t easy. The device manager doesn’t work on Windows 7. He tried an XP box, but it didn’t detect the device.

Finally, he discovered that the hard drive was kaput and replaced it with an 8GB Microdrive. That helped, but he still had a hard row to hoe. [OiD] formatted the new HD and gave it the official firmware, but still had to replace some system files according to the Philips manual. He ended up using RockBox to reanimate it and decided to keep it on the device.

There was still an issue with charging, though. It has an IC that handles selection of either the proprietary external adapter or USB power, but the RockBox firmware doesn’t implement switching and defaults to the adapter. Several tweaks and a hacked-in mini USB later, the patient is in stable condition and cranking out the tunes.

PS3 Jailbreak – Now In Apple Flavor!

September 25, 2010 by 23 Comments

Image courtesy of DanyL of psx-scene

The newest member of the PS3 jailbreaking tool crowd is the iPod family. More specifically, iPods running the open source media firmware Rockbox. Even better news, theoretically it should be possible to use this same method on any MP3 player running the Rockbox software. Right now the exploit package only works on select generations of the iPod Nano and iPod Classic line, but if the trend set by the PSX-scene forums continues, it would be worth checking back in the near future if your device is not already supported. Thanks to [shuffle2] for providing the hack, and [DanAdamKOF] for the heads up.

If Apple isn’t your device of choice, you can also check out some of your other jailbreaking options.