Great work! I'm the guy that's working on recompiling the iPod games for modern systems (I'm mentioned by the top comment in your Reddit post). Have you tried installing the games in the emulator? If so, this would be a huge step in figuring out the DRM so people can dump their own games. That would lead to more games being supported in siggifly's 5.5G emulator [1] and eventually the games can be brought to more modern platforms.
Do you remember if it was named Musika? [1] If so, that game has actually been decrypted so I could work on a recomp. There's also Phase [2] which seems like the more likely pick. Unfortunately, it was never decrypted. I modeled out the Metadata db structure that the iPod OS exposed to games that represented its iTunesDB so I should be able to support custom songs/albums in a recomp in the future. Long term, I'd love to be able to BYO API key for Spotify and expose your Spotify library to the game as your "iPod's" music. I feel like that would modernize the experience. I'll get there when work calms down and I'm no longer working 60 hour work weeks :(
> One thing we already know is that the firmware is from Apple and is encrypted, so there's no legal download.
wInd3x can decrypt it.
> and the boot ROM cannot be read from the running device
Yes it can, you just need to turn on the right clock gate.
I'm so tired of AI slop. We've been reverse engineering these SoCs slowly and carefully for years, but this is what ends up getting published and shared.
We can all combine our own knowledge, enthusiasm, and AI to do amazing things. It's like using better computers with better processors. For programming, I could perfectly well use a PC from 2001.
It's free_my_ipod and devos50 is not capitalized like (it makes no sense if you knew that it's a derivative of a last name).
You might say all these things but I can't see anything but disrespect if you can't even be bothered to spell the name of the involved project/people correctly.
Your work wouldn't exist in this shape without those who came in before you, and all you're doing is discouraging them (at least me) from ever publishing any code or research again.
I can imagine some people feel like it's cheating because they did it the hard way. I have much respect for those people and their skillset and I hope AI doesn't discourage them.
Yeah, I'm really pissed at all these car drivers doing marathons in 26 minutes because I've been working on it for years and can't get my time below 4 hrs.
Even though I used AI, it took me months to decipher parts of the emulation. I had to study, and I loved learning things I didn't know. It's also a very beautiful learning path; everything related to technology is magical. Engineers from all over the world are trying to revive the iPod and products that are no longer commercially available.
I think another problem is: vibecoded emulators (like this one seems to be?) are likely to be a stunt, a cool project, but will not be maintained. Upstreaming this to qemu requires at least some human effort, and it is not very likely to happen. So we are left with a cool trick.
Some communities are particular about maintaining cleanroom reverse-engineering (case in point: Portal 64 getting taken down for using Nintendo's leaked N64 SDK and not the OSS libdragon SDK) and are wary of people submitting AI-generated PRs without being able to account for their sources
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 9.0 ms ] thread[1] https://github.com/siggifly/ipod-emulator/ I made the PR that allowed it to run dumped games fwiw
-Spore, basically the first phase of PC Spore game, was still fun though.
-This one game which was like guitar hero, but used the clickwheel and would automatically generate tracks from your songs.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfuF_i7N2M4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9scEk1_lQXc
If you're going to paste raw claude output, please at least replace "I" with "Claude".
wInd3x can decrypt it.
> and the boot ROM cannot be read from the running device
Yes it can, you just need to turn on the right clock gate.
I'm so tired of AI slop. We've been reverse engineering these SoCs slowly and carefully for years, but this is what ends up getting published and shared.
It's free_my_ipod and devos50 is not capitalized like (it makes no sense if you knew that it's a derivative of a last name).
You might say all these things but I can't see anything but disrespect if you can't even be bothered to spell the name of the involved project/people correctly.
Your work wouldn't exist in this shape without those who came in before you, and all you're doing is discouraging them (at least me) from ever publishing any code or research again.
https://github.com/davidtphung/coverflow-media
https://512pixels.net/2023/10/the-history-of-cover-flow/
https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/1wbapys/zevora_e... https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/1w8b6rk/ruzu_is_... https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/1vz9na6/pc_ports...
Anyone looking for FW/IPSW https://www.felixbruns.de/iPod/firmware/