Rockbox Development > New Ports
Rio Karma
LambdaCalculus:
I have been struck by the Idea Storm again, folks. :)
A coworker has just recently shown me a most coveted prize: the Rio Karma... truly a DAP of hardcore proportions. Anyone who has owned (or will own!) this DAP know of its rich features, such as... Rockbox?
Wait... no Rockbox on it? Are you daft?
So now I'm on the hunt for information about the Karma, and I've gotten quite a lot of good information on hand!
-- The Karma is PortalPlayer based; it has a PP5003 SoC, dual-core ARM7 which can clock at up to 90Mhz. This is essentially the same as the PP5002, but with the "broken" cache fixed. (I should note that the Karma played both Vorbis and FLAC natively, so of course the CPU had to be powerful enough to handle it!)
-- Quite a bit of the hardware inside is similar to other supported targets; for example, the Karma uses the same Hitachi hard drives as the iriver H10 20GB, and the DAC/headphone amp is a Wolfson 8721/8731... the same as in the early iPods!
-- There's much more to be said, but I'm going to be posting that to its upcoming wiki page.
I don't have my own Karma (yet), but once I get one... ;)
scharkalvin:
Here's your chance to snag a few of them.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Lot-Of-5-Rio-Karma-20GB-MP3-Players-90260461-5000-Songs_W0QQitemZ170174719952QQihZ007QQcategoryZ51004QQtcZphotoQQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
evilnick:
I've had a few (3) Karmas in my time. They were waaaay ahead of their time and it was only when I found out about Rockbox on the H1x0 series that I decided to jump ship.
The main disadvantage was in the non-standard database-only way of loading files - just like the iPod, although there was a way of loading "regular files" onto it, but these couldn't be played by the firmware.
ISTR that there was quite a bit of interest in hacking this. I'd recommend searching on the forums at Riovolution.com and also as the codebase was the evolution (or at least similar to) the Empeg series of car players then there has been some discussion there too. (For where 'there' is, that'll have to be a job for Google).
Shame that it was plagued by HDD issues as it was ergonomically sound, played gapless ogg/flac/mp3 and had some really nifty db features (anyone who's owned one and hung around said Riovolution foums enough will remember "Wendy flags" with fondness!).
Best of luck with this, Lambda.
LambdaCalculus:
--- Quote from: scharkalvin on December 06, 2007, 02:08:41 PM ---Here's your chance to snag a few of them.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Lot-Of-5-Rio-Karma-20GB-MP3-Players-90260461-5000-Songs_W0QQitemZ170174719952QQihZ007QQcategoryZ51004QQtcZphotoQQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
--- End quote ---
I see lots like that often, so I may pick up a lot after Xmas is over.
If I manage to, I'll gladly send out some Karmas from that lot to any devs who are interested, and purchase one fully working one for the day Rockbox's logo does splash onto the screen. :)
GodEater:
I used to have one of these players too - it's what my iRiver H140 ended up replacing because I ran out of disc space on it. Also - one of my very good friends was one of the developers on it :)
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