Rocbox for Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 & 6

[esper256]

OK, hear me out. Obviously you wouldn't want to replace your phone's firmware with the rockbox firmware. But what about compiling rockbox as an application to go on top of windows mobile 5 or 6

There are currently no real good media playing solutions for WM. There are a few programs that play mp3s. A few play OGGs. Nobody has the codec support that rockbox has, or the great user interface features. Can any more experienced rockboxer weigh in on how difficult it would be instead of porting all the hardware centric stuff to instead just implement the lower level APIs using the MS SDK for windows mobile. They all run on ARM, and I assume RockBox already runs on ARM right?

Feel free to tell me my idea sucks.

[LambdaCalculus]

Rockbox as an app is being discussed here:

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=15139.0

What we need is SDL for the Windows Mobile platform.

Microsoft's SDKs? Not happening.

[esper256]

Thanks Lambda. Sorry didn't manage to find that thread.

Apparently there might be home for SDL on WM.
http://www.libsdl.org/faq.php?action=listentries&category=4#40

Does RockBox really use SDL?

[saratoga]

Does RockBox really use SDL?

Yes, though honestly if someone were really interested, I don't see why they couldn't port it to some native WM api.

[JdGordon]

I havnt had much finding info on getting sdl to compile for WM, but I have found ceGCC which supposedly woulld let you compile sdl apps for it, but havnt had much luck with tthat yet.

IF someone points me in the right direction to get sdl compingg for WM then ill do the rockbox code needed for proper rockbox-as-app which has been requested for a while.

[Llorean]

Ask the ScummVM guys how they do it? ScummVM is SDL based, and there's a WM port of it. I'm about 80% sure it runs on SDL.

[saratoga]

I've been working on Rockbox for Windows Mobile for a few weeks now.  So far, I've:

1)  Split the Sim stuff apart and into the target tree so that you can compile "SDL" targets like would be needed for WM, iPhone, whatever.
2)  Added device driver stuff in the target tree so you could talk directly to the OS's API instead of SDL for performance, or if SDL wasn't available and you didn't mind some more work porting to native APIs
3)  Setup the Windows CE gcc port and managed to link against SDL in WM.

Now I'm working on getting rockbox to compile against the wince SDL with wince-gcc.  I've not made much progress on this front, since I've let myself be distracted by codec optimization these past 2 weeks.  If any would be Windows CE/Mobile hackers are around, they're welcome to pitch in.

[JdGordon]

just a bump to try and drum up more support.

http://cegcc.wiki.sourceforge.net/Install shows how to setup the cross compiler and links to the SDL install. I have manahed to use that to run a sdl demo app on my phone so rockbox should definitely be doable.

attached is a patch by saratoga (you dont mine me posting it yeah? ) to get configure to use the sdl+cegcc combo but unfortunately it fails miserably in uisimulator/common/io.c.

Windows gives us enough access to the hardware through regular c api calls so we don't necessarily have to use SDL if it turns out we can use the windows API just as easily....