On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Tim Schmidt wrote:

> I can certainly grab chip info off the web... the majority of chips are
> already documented at
> http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IriverH3XXHardwareComponents#Hard_Drive

Then you could just add pointers to that info. It simply is neat to have one
page with as much as possible of the HW described and an easy place to start
looking when you're interested in a particular Rockbox port.

> Is there anything else I should be looking for? I'm no electrical engineer,
> just a sysadmin, so any pointers would help a great deal.

I would really suggest you start looking for fellow MPeye owners that are
interested in helping you out on this quest. Doing a port to a new platform
totally on your own is a tedious and tiresome task. Hunt down some forums or
lists dedicated to users/fans of this player and tell them your dreams and
hopes and cross your fingers they come running in large amounts (of skilled
hackers)!

Given that this is a Coldfire platform, I would guess that you can connect a
BDM to the unit and I would seriously advice you to do that before attempting
any kind of upgrade to your own build (even though that might still be a bit
distant).

You should not under-estimate the time and effort it takes to get the
bootloader working fine on a new target, even if it is similar to an existing.

>> 3 - Start figuring out how the firmware update file is layed out.
>
> I'll dig out my trusty hex editor and get to work.

How is the firmware upgrade procedure? You put the new firmware somewhere on
the device and you use the original firmware to flash that?

If you're lucky, the firmware isn't (that heavily) scrambled.

-- 
  Daniel Stenberg -- http://www.rockbox.org/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/