Olympus M:Robe 500

[thomazff]

There is this page:

http://www.mrobe.org/ (Sorry if i can't post this).

Where people with M:robe from olympus want to make a new OS or anything else than the original, or even making a new firmware.

My question is, is it possible to have rockbox on a m:robe 500?
And what would it take?


Thanks

THOMAZ

[LinusN]

I have no idea. Take it apart, scan the circuit boards and publish the scans somewhere. Then we may be able to tell you more.

[tucoz]

No need to dissassemble anything. For the neat sum of $2,950 you can buy a nice 88 page pdf with the dissassembly info ;-) http://www.teardown.com/channels/pdas/Olympus_mrobe.aspx

[thomazff]

By scans do you mean pictures of the inside of the mrobe?

[keytotime]

Yep

[thomazff]

Here is a link.

http://213.100.40.206/~robesync/robesync/pix/

[keytotime]

It's another TI

[thomazff]

Newbie here, could you explain this "It's another TI" for me?

[LinusN]

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/TexasInstrumentsDM320

It means that we can't port Rockbox to it since there is no free compiler for it. Sorry.

[nopasaran]

sorry for gravediggin but how about porting rockbox for the m:robe100 It should even have portaplayer PP5020E arm7 CPU like some ipods have... on the mrobe.org forum are a few people who have some experience with asm and I believe arm asm has free compiler available everywhere...

[saratoga]

sorry for gravediggin but how about porting rockbox for the m:robe100 It should even have portaplayer PP5020E arm7 CPU like some ipods have... on the mrobe.org forum are a few people who have some experience with asm and I believe arm asm has free compiler available everywhere...

Heh I like this:

It would be very easy, all we need to do is ask one of the Rockbox guys to reprogram the interface.

"All" we have to do is write the drivers for it 

But yeah, I guess its easier then starting from scratch, since some of the work is done.  Doesn't sound like anyone over there is working on it though.

Also, ASM isn't a language, its short for assembly.  Assembly is what compilers produce, so theres no need for a compiler if you're writing assembly.

[nopasaran]

Well of course you need to compile assembly. If you are going to write code in asm then at least you will need to translate it back into an executable format, don't you? If you write a bunch of opcodes adressing cpu registers into a text file, you can't execute it... you need to turn it into binary code. I might be talking out of my ass here... maybe I am mixing up the correct terms?

[blooflame]

Just trying to make things clear..

In general, an assembler does a one-to-one translation of human-friendly opcodes into machine language (although they do allow macros and such)

A compiler generally does a one-to-many translation from a high-level languange (like C, or COBOL even) to machine language.

In the case of the GCC toolset, the compilers create assembly language as output (usually) and pass it through a GNU assembler to create machine code for the targeted system.  Doing in a two-phase approach makes it easier for cross-compiling environments to be set up.  I'm, of course, leaving out a lot of details but in general the GNU assembler is the main piece to be modified to create output for a new machine architecture.

[saratoga]

Well of course you need to compile assembly. If you are going to write code in asm then at least you will need to translate it back into an executable format, don't you? If you write a bunch of opcodes adressing cpu registers into a text file, you can't execute it... you need to turn it into binary code. I might be talking out of my ass here... maybe I am mixing up the correct terms?

You assemble assembly

Compilers generate assembly which is then assembled.  Most do it in one step, but not all.  You can actually tell gcc to compile but not assemble IIRC.

[ts-x]

Just saw this and thought those interested in this port might want to take a look...
http://mrobe.fan.googlepages.com/m%3Arobe500iide