Hey, you know what would be really cool… if there was a software development kit for the fuze.
An OpenSource firmware would be nice, Netgear made a couple of OpenSource Routers, and they seemed to sell good.
But if that is impossible due to license issues or something, maybe have parts of the code changeable, via dll, virtual machine/ bytecode or a scripting language.
so that you could change or even fully rewrite the menu.
The community could write additional functionality like a text/pdf viewer or games. I could imagine that the fuze controls would be interesting for creating some original games.
In terms of modding, idsoftwares Quake series was mostly so popular because it had good modding capabilities.
I know this will probably not happen for the fuze, since it would probably require a lot of changes, but maybe keep this thought in mind for the next device… that would definetly be a good reason for me to buy it!
If any developer is reading this, I’m curious… what language is the firmware written in ?
I might go into media device firmware development when I’m done studying.
And if you ever decide to go for the SDK, I’d love spending my precious time on betatesting it…
I’ve previously tested betas & sdk’s for idsoftware and splashdamage and helped them improve their products a lot.
The SDK belongs to Austriamicrosystems. Sandisk can only use it, not distribute it.
If you want to develop an opensource firmware for your player - join the Rockbox team.
They are currently working hard on the “Sansa AMS” port, which refers to Fuze, Clip, c200v2, e200v2 and m200 fw.4. and are very near getting most of necessary things to work :>
I can confirm the Fuze buttons do not work in the main Rockbox.
…
Apart from the buttons, the lcd ain’t stable. Even without buttons enabled, the display flickers frequently.
…
The code isn’t committed yet, because it required quite some changes and we still experience a lot of unexplained deadlocks/reboots/shutdown etc … but sometimes we can hear our songs
[irony]indeed, very near…[/irony]
honestly, I haven’t done much actual hardware accessing, I’ve once tried doing some PIC programming, but soon got bored,
besides risking my fuze for that is not what I want to do…
When they reach the point, where lcd, sound, buttons are working, I’ll check it out and see if I can work on more advanced stuff.
LCD works (not stable on the Fuze yet, but still works) sound works (not stable on the Fuze yet) but buttons don’t work on the Fuze yet…
They’ll have it done pretty soon, though!
Never having had a player with Rockbox, what is it about this thing that makes people want it so badly for the Fuze and the Clip? They can’t get any easier to use, and they support FLAC and Ogg Vorbis now, so what else is so great about it? I’ve heard gapless playback, but is that it? 'Cause frankly, at this point , there’s very little I would change with either of my players…I think SanDisk has done a heckuva job with them :wink:
yeah, I know not everyone wants everything. But the beauty of it is, that you are not restricted to what one company thinks is good. Some may want ID3-Database based browsing, others want directory browsing, still others would like to have both. Rockbox has both. Rockbox also has other advantages over the sandisk firmware. For example they can play apple itunes files (when not DRM protected) without reencoding them. This is good, because it is a well known fact that every lossy reencoding degrades the sound quality. So when your source is already lossy, you probably don’t want to reencoding at all.
Almost every added feature is more or less a matter of taste. But at least the features are available. Some have a copy of the wikipedia on their mp3-players. I wouldn’t say that an mp3 player is the perfect device to read stuff, but at least you could do it if you like. If you know something about c programming and you are willing to spend some time on it, you can implement whatever feature the hardware allows. And that’s a lot.
About the warranty issues: in theory that could be a problem. But google a bit about that. There don’t seem to be people that ever experienced a problem (once the firmware is outside of development status and well tested). The only critical feature is most of the time the dualboot itself, because when thats done, you can use the original firmware to restore the flash. After restoring it to its unmodified state nobody can tell if there ever was another firmware on it. And dualboot is already stable on the player.
