All Clickwheel Ipod Games Have Now Been Preserved for Posterity
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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Game PreservationIpodRetro Gaming
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Game Preservation
Ipod
Retro Gaming
The preservation of all 54 clickwheel iPod games has been achieved, sparking nostalgia and discussion about retro gaming and the potential for reviving old technology.
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https://archive.org/details/icgpp
https://www.fiio.com/m21
Its an audiophile market now, you know .. gold buttons sound better, and all that.
(Anyway, I was merely interested in the price range, and probably not actually buying.)
Sony Walkman series also has nifty looking devices, but way over my budget (even the entry level model).
Amazon has it listed for 220euro's, which is a reasonable price imho.
Of course there are other manufacturers out there, this is just the one I know about ..
Edit: Actually, I forgot the eBay listing said it was a 5.5 gen but the serial number when I got it was just 5th gen, and I got a full refund! £20 in total then.
I have one of AIGO EROS Q / EROS K / AGPTek H3 / HIFI WALKER H2 / Surfans F20 with Rockbox and it's great. And the existence of reasonably prices half-terabyte SD cards is obviously a great improvement too.
Also most watches can function as music players with wireless headphones nowadays. For a while I ran a low-notification apple watch purely for the time, nfc (payments and to enter the gym) and music functions.
A friend told me that in competitive climbing people are required to be in isolation before the climb. As https://climbingbusinessjournal.com/strategies-to-help-youth... says:
"Communication in and out of Iso is always prohibited because someone could relay pictures of the competition routes for climbers to preview, resulting in an unfair advantage. Therefore, all electronics with internet connection are not allowed. An iPod without internet capability is allowed for warming up, but you are forbidden from listening to music while you are climbing the competition routes. I guess this sentence should be obvious, but no walkie talkies, cans on a string, smoke signals, etc."
There's also parents who get internet-free music devices for their kids. I've even heard of a kid who could take an old iPod Shuffle with them to a "no screen" camp, as it has no screen.
If you need to grab the phone every time you change songs it’s likely you’ll check notifications or something of the sort.
The same goes for going for a walk with music but not the phone, to be unreachable. You could use airplane mode but there’s value in the added friction.
- Listening to music doesn't drain your phone. Also it's offline, which is a bonus for hiking/biking/flights.
- Underrated convo starter. Set one down on a bar top as you sit down and i promise you'll be talking to everyone around you
- The battery life is unmatched, including by modern DAP's. Mine is running a stock battery (still!) and gets days of playback. Weeks/months when idle (use it too much to know for sure).
- iFlash [1] has replacement boards for $30-$40 that let you use modern nvme storage over spinning media. Simple swap and has been rock solid for me for years.
- Audio quality over 3.5mm aux ports is noticeably superior to bluetooth in most (older?) cars
Would they take off today? I think there could be a retro-y scene for them, especially if they had any wifi connectivity. The device remains one of the best purpose-built consumer devices, and that's hard not to appreciate. My 10yr old daughter thinks it's less cool than i do, though.
1. https://www.iflash.xyz/
It was released in a time that people bought mp3s, even ringtones!
By then, the iphone and associated app revenue had long taken over their revenue. But on the other hand, if they applied the same metrics to Mac they would've discontinued that years ago too, but they need Mac for people to build iPhone apps.
[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/10469/apple-ipod-sales/
I see the difference often in the gym. The people with smart watches for music aren't getting distracted from their workouts, while the people with their phones for music tend to take long pauses, or even get caught up watching tiktok/stories/reels.
And also, for people who really want to get away from their phone the Apple Watch is already a standalone music player.
[1] https://mashable.com/archive/disney-animation-app
We've largely forgotten what a strangely big deal iPod launches used to be. I remember being mildly amused/amazed by the fact you could see them announced online and in use on the London Underground within hours.
What was the SDK/toolchain like? Did you have any way to test the software in an emulator/simulator on a PC? What was debugging like? Was the iPod software/hardware you were developing against in any way special?
[1] - IIRC after the binary is decrypted, loaded into memory at a fixed address, and a symbol table (based on numeric IDs, not strings) is used to populate a trampoline with function pointers that the app requested. There seems to be no privilege separation between the app and the rest of the OS, as is the case for the iPod software in general.
These games were largely heavily derived from their Brew/WinMo/Symbian versions, which were (subset of) C++ games developed on PCs and then retargeted to embedded devices using compilers with annoying licensing servers. Almost everyone that did this enough had their own PC runtime, and would barely touch any device/platform specific emulator even if it existed, a situation that remained the case until Unreal/Unity took over.
> There seems to be no privilege separation between the app and the rest of the OS, as is the case for the iPod software in general.
This was/is common for most RTOS type environments where MMUs were not a thing. For example, the whole point of Brew and J2ME was to provide some level of separation prior to the later Symbians and then Android/iOS etc.
Thanks anyways! :)
> This was/is common for most RTOS type environments where MMUs were not a thing. For example, the whole point of Brew and J2ME was to provide some level of separation prior to the later Symbians and then Android/iOS etc.
Right - although all the S5L series chips used in the later iPods had an MMU (other than the S5L8701 in the Nano 2G, which only had an MPU). They also had a pretty tight boot chain (all stages signed/encrypted). It's a weird contrast to the pretty lax security measures within the OS itself :). But I guess reworking the old iPod codebase (which started with PortalPlayer chips) to make use of the MPU/MMU would have been too much effort.
To save you googling:
* BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for...
* WinMo: Windows Mobile
I also think these games are still not decrypted - some previous ones were, but the methodology was not made public. The decryption routine in the devices I've looked at is obfuscated, so it might be easier to modify the firmware to save decrypted blobs than reimplement it.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/30917/phase/credits/ipod-clas...
I really have to applaud the preservers on this one. The installation method is really quite clever! I had thought these games lost forever due to DRM, but happy to get to play them again, even with the bizarre controls!
If someone like me wanted to see a playthrough. What a trip down memory lane. Still remember having Mr Bean's Holiday on my clickwheel iPod and watching it every time my parents took me somewhere to the point I remembered all the dialogues.
Good times.