I finally had a few minutes to start working through the new list of ‘to hack’ items this weekend, so I started with the Nickelodean NPower fusion gaming console. Buy.com had these for 17$, and I’ve seen them at various secondhand retailers here in southern California for about the same. It supports j2me, cldc1.1, and midp2. For 17$ this would be a fantastic target for a beginning java games developer. The absolute rock bottom price would allow for some fun opportunities like beta test groups, without the terrible expense usually incurred purchasing mobile devices.
*Update In Comments”
Using my trusty random number generators, I have randomly selected the winners of each category. No one was excluded and everyone had an equal chance to win. Congratulations to all winners, and all contestants! I think we had a great Hackaway! Emails will go out to all contestants shortly. The winners are:
Aaand it’s over. Just over 48 hours after it began and what a great ride it’s been. What a response! The winners have already entered, they just don’t know who they are!!
I have a very ominous looking stack of upcoming hacking projects. I also have a very lonely looking stack of already hacked projects, extra consoles, spare parts etc. To clear up space for the new hacks, I’m giving away 9 previous hacks. Read on for how to enter.
The Girltech IM-ME is a basic usb radio transmiter paired with a small console like device. It was suggested to me on the TP hacking thread I posted up a while ago. Hacking the IM-ME turned out to be an easy reverse-engineer, as there is no crypto to worry about and everything is sent in cleartext hex (everything). For 12$, this makes quite a nice little wireless console device. Read on for the protocol and info on implementing your own driver
After ordering the IM-ME as a filler item on Amazon (what won’t I do for super-saver shipping), I plugged it in to my linux box. It was recognized as a standard HID device. This is good, as Girltech obviously didn’t go to any great lengths to protect the communication coming off this thing. At this point, I could have either loaded up a windows VM with a promiscuous USB driver at the host OS level, or loaded up a windows VM with snoopypro installed. I went (as I usually do when reverse-engineering usb protocols) with snoopypro. The output driver strings are quite easy to read and patterns are colored by communication direction.
My former graduate research has been collected and published in a book about grid computing. You can buy it on amazon here.
Busy busy as always, but still trying new packages as they catch my eye. Not that anyone is surprised at what the Z2 can do after seeing Full Throttle running, but for the MSX lovers out there openMSX runs at 100% speed with sound etc etc.
Just apt-get install openmsx, and run it once with a rom. Exit out, then edit the ~/.openMSX/share/settings.xml and set your scale factor to one. I found a sample config file on the net here that worked well.
That will set the output to 320×240, looks and runs great.
I acquired the Trivial Pursuit – Digital Choice Edition game at a local target for 10$. It’s an interesting little device, with an b&w LCD display, usb out, 16mb internal storage, and the ability to download or create your own questions… on windows only (ouch).. Turns out it’s an interesting device. Here’s what I’ve been able to find out so far.
So now that the Z2 is running debian and everything is working, it’s really easy to install new programs and emulators. They are even automatically added to the fluxbox right-click mouse menu. I haven’t changed or recompiled a single C file this time, this is fully “general public” ready! Here’s what I’ve been playing with this weekend.
Just a quick followup to the debian image video.
