Rockbox As An Application Project

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This page is outdated. See RockboxAsAnApplication2010 for the most recent approach to this project.

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General

Rockbox has always been used as a complete firmware replacement, providing both the operating system and applications for the hardware it runs on. However, recently hardware devices that provide an API for 3rd party development have become more popular. Such devices include cell phones and other hardware that would be difficult or impossible to replace the retail firmware on. This project aims to make rockbox run as an application on such devices by providing a frame work for compiling rockbox as an application, and then hopefully providing an example port.

Plan

Implement a rockbox port to SDL using the uisimulator as a base. However, rather then simulating another target, this should be a native SDL version using the target tree and incorporating CPU specific optimizations where appropriate. SDL bindings should be modular enough to replace SDL with native APIs if available.

Pick a target and implement port to it.

Status

I've hacked together a patch that allows configure can now generate a working (plays audio) SDL target on x86 Linux that does not #defined SIMULATOR that mostly uses the target tree. Buttons, display, sound and threading is in the target tree. A few misc features that are common to the sim are not. For now, the target tree code is almost an exact duplicate of the sim code.

http://www.duke.edu/~mgg6/sdl.patch

I've also built the windows ce gcc port and am investigating using it with rockbox.

TODO

Pick a hardware device and develop the SDL and possibly native API support for it

Who's working on this

Michael Giacomelli
Jonathan Gordon