New cheap portable player in the market

[meyertime]

reading your guy's posts now it seems like a miracle that the one mp3 player in the beginning of this thread had 4mb of ram!

No kidding! That's why I'm thinking of getting that device, even if the DAC is poor.

[saucell]

reading your guy's posts now it seems like a miracle that the one mp3 player in the beginning of this thread had 4mb of ram!

No kidding! That's why I'm thinking of getting that device, even if the DAC is poor.

if you manage to get rockbox working on that mp3 player i'll buy ten of them LULZ!

[speachy]

reading your guy's posts now it seems like a miracle that the one mp3 player in the beginning of this thread had 4mb of ram!

It is pretty unusual by today's standards, that's for sure.

What I think happened is that its manufacturer got a large pile of the Spreadtrum SoCs for practically nothing, making the resulting devices cost-competitive with the more "modern" shovelware ATJ2157/RKNano-based  units.

[spaceship9876]

would the RKNanoD SoC be viable? - https://www.rock-chips.com/a/en/products/RK_Nano_Series/2016/0908/790.html

[speachy]

would the RKNanoD SoC be viable? - https://www.rock-chips.com/a/en/products/RK_Nano_Series/2016/0908/790.html

The RKNano-D has a total of 1MB of RAM, with no provision for external memory. 

Additionally, this memory is actually split between the two processor cores.  While the datasheet implies they can access each others' memories, it's not clear if they share a common mapping.

Regardless, 1MB of RAM just isn't going to cut it, at least not without a significant culling of our functionality, including moving back to exclusively codecs that the hardware can decode.

So, no, this isn't really viable for what folks think of as "rockbox".

[spaceship9876]

this looks extremely interesting: https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/25/sonatino-raspberry-pi-zero-sized-esp32-s3-audio-board/

would this be rockboxable?

[saucell]

this looks extremely interesting: https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/25/sonatino-raspberry-pi-zero-sized-esp32-s3-audio-board/

would this be rockboxable?

based on reading this thread it looks like you need a minimum of 4mb of ram to run rockbox. probably 8mb preferred. 

[speachy]

Well, 2MB will work, but it means losing some codecs and plugins.  Plus a small, monochrome screen (higher resolution / bit depths require bigger framebuffers)

But the ESP32 devices use *PSRAM* which is off-chip, and connected over SPI, so it's _considerably_ slower (and higher-latency) than on-chip SRAM, or even off-chip DRAM.

So, no, these ESP32s aren't ideal.

This is a _far_ better basis for a port:  https://www.electro-smith.com/daisy/daisy

It sports a Cortex-M7 @480MHz, 64MB SDRAM, 8MB QSPI flash (plus ~384K/1M onboard SRAM/flash IIRC), and a decent WM8731 96Khz/24bit codec.

[saucell]

rockbox running on 64mb of ram holy fudge.......

[speachy]

rockbox running on 64mb of ram holy fudge.......

Honestly, when we're running off of solid-state storage, you'd probably be hard pressed to see a difference with anything over 16MB of RAM.  If you leave out some of the games, anything over 8MB is probably superfluous.  The main reason the old-school ipods etc had so much RAM was because the spinning-rust hard drives were quite power hungry, and the more RAM you had, the longer you could leave the hard drive powered down.  Granted, flash storage uses power too, but compared to spinning rust, peak power is far lower and powerup is nearly instantaneous, so you can get away with buffering a lot less than before.

That said, these days, it's probably _cheaper_ to buy a 64MB RAM chip than one that's "only" 8MB.

[saucell]

rockbox running on 64mb of ram holy fudge.......

Honestly, when we're running off of solid-state storage, you'd probably be hard pressed to see a difference with anything over 16MB of RAM.  If you leave out some of the games, anything over 8MB is probably superfluous.  The main reason the old-school ipods etc had so much RAM was because the spinning-rust hard drives were quite power hungry, and the more RAM you had, the longer you could leave the hard drive powered down.  Granted, flash storage uses power too, but compared to spinning rust, peak power is far lower and powerup is nearly instantaneous, so you can get away with buffering a lot less than before.

That said, these days, it's probably _cheaper_ to buy a 64MB RAM chip than one that's "only" 8MB.

forgive me for not reading all threads on this message board but why doesn't one of you geniuses make a player from that board and we all kickstart it? not enough people would put money down because a dedicated rockbox player is a niche thing?

[saratoga]

rockbox running on 64mb of ram holy fudge.......

Honestly, when we're running off of solid-state storage, you'd probably be hard pressed to see a difference with anything over 16MB of RAM.  If you leave out some of the games, anything over 8MB is probably superfluous.  The main reason the old-school ipods etc had so much RAM was because the spinning-rust hard drives were quite power hungry, and the more RAM you had, the longer you could leave the hard drive powered down.  Granted, flash storage uses power too, but compared to spinning rust, peak power is far lower and powerup is nearly instantaneous, so you can get away with buffering a lot less than before.

That said, these days, it's probably _cheaper_ to buy a 64MB RAM chip than one that's "only" 8MB.

forgive me for not reading all threads on this message board but why doesn't one of you geniuses make a player from that board and we all kickstart it? not enough people would put money down because a dedicated rockbox player is a niche thing?

See here:  https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,6751.0.html

[saucell]

rockbox running on 64mb of ram holy fudge.......

Honestly, when we're running off of solid-state storage, you'd probably be hard pressed to see a difference with anything over 16MB of RAM.  If you leave out some of the games, anything over 8MB is probably superfluous.  The main reason the old-school ipods etc had so much RAM was because the spinning-rust hard drives were quite power hungry, and the more RAM you had, the longer you could leave the hard drive powered down.  Granted, flash storage uses power too, but compared to spinning rust, peak power is far lower and powerup is nearly instantaneous, so you can get away with buffering a lot less than before.

That said, these days, it's probably _cheaper_ to buy a 64MB RAM chip than one that's "only" 8MB.

forgive me for not reading all threads on this message board but why doesn't one of you geniuses make a player from that board and we all kickstart it? not enough people would put money down because a dedicated rockbox player is a niche thing?

See here:  https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,6751.0.html

thanks for the link. if after 15 years of talking about it we aren't any closer to making a dedicated rockbox player i guess i wont hold my breath that its going to happen soon. either way i would put some cash down on a kickstarter if it did!

[lubatur]

either way i would put some cash down on a kickstarter if it did!

Me too.

[meyertime]

thanks for the link. if after 15 years of talking about it we aren't any closer to making a dedicated rockbox player i guess i wont hold my breath that its going to happen soon. either way i would put some cash down on a kickstarter if it did!

I would do what I can to fund it as well.  I shied away from reading that enormous thread...  I wonder if it would be easier now than it would have been back when that thread was started.  With Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and similar boards readily available.  I think someone would just have to take the time to design it, build a prototype...

Unfortunately, I don't have time for such fun.  If it were me, I would take the easiest route using readily available parts to get something that works.  It would probably be bulky and ugly.  That's why I thought it might be easier to just take a device that already exists and port Rockbox to it.