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> It just amuses me though that a bunch of people can take the device apart
> and figure out how it works with no access to any technical data at all.
> This should be 100% impossible, but somehow they did it. And they did it
> better than the makers themselves...
I'm sure the total number of man-hours they spent reverse engineering it and
rewriting the firmware *far* outweighs what the OEM spent on it. For a
commercial venture it just wouldn't be profitable, but if a group of people
enjoy doing that for a hobby, sure.
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scott wrote:
>> It just amuses me though that a bunch of people can take the device
>> apart and figure out how it works with no access to any technical data
>> at all. This should be 100% impossible, but somehow they did it. And
>> they did it better than the makers themselves...
>
> I'm sure the total number of man-hours they spent reverse engineering it
> and rewriting the firmware *far* outweighs what the OEM spent on it.
> For a commercial venture it just wouldn't be profitable, but if a group
> of people enjoy doing that for a hobby, sure.
The OEM has the spec sheet though, so it should be many millions of
times easier for them to design software for it.
I mean, an MP3 player isn't exactly a complex piece of hardware. There's
a battery, a harddrive, a processor, and a DAC. I would think those are
all off-the-shelf components. Just stick them in a box, put in the 3
microswitches for the buttons, and your hardware is done.
The *software* is what makes it a useful device...
Still, I suppose if you can limit the number of crashes to less than
once per day, you can probably get people to buy it before they realise
there's a problem.
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Jim Henderson wrote:
>
> technically, :q or :q! - the first will exit and prompt you if you made
> changes, the second will quit and not save your changes. If you want to
> quit and save changes, then :w will write. I prefer shift+ZZ myself, it
> quits and writes changes. :-)
I use :wq (or :wq!, if :wq complains that the file is write-protected :p).
> Jim
-Aero
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Invisible wrote:
>
> Sure. And do you know how to *find* that?
I did a search in the interweb for the first time :p.
-Aero
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scott wrote:
>
> I'm sure the total number of man-hours they spent reverse engineering it
> and rewriting the firmware *far* outweighs what the OEM spent on it.
> For a commercial venture it just wouldn't be profitable, but if a group
> of people enjoy doing that for a hobby, sure.
>
And if they released the specs for that kind of device to the 3rd party
members could, that 3rd party could make better software even faster and
generate bigger sales for that current product.
-Aero
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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> scott wrote:
>> I'm sure the total number of man-hours they spent reverse engineering it
>> and rewriting the firmware *far* outweighs what the OEM spent on it.
>> For a commercial venture it just wouldn't be profitable, but if a group
>> of people enjoy doing that for a hobby, sure.
>>
>
> And if they released the specs for that kind of device to the 3rd party
> members could, that 3rd party could make better software even faster and
> generate bigger sales for that current product.
Weeell... the guys who made the updated firmware for *my* device also
offer more or less the same program for several *rival* devices too. Not
sure how that works commercially...
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Invisible wrote:
>
> Weeell... the guys who made the updated firmware for *my* device also
> offer more or less the same program for several *rival* devices too. Not
> sure how that works commercially...
Why would it make *your* device sell less? It still has the original
firmware in place, so the people who buy it now would still buy it. Also
the people who want this 3rd party firmware to run as well as possible
would buy it, if they actually supported that 3rd party.
Let's take a secondary example. Most PC's comes with Windows
pre-installed. Does the possibility of installing Linux lower their
sales? Or PS2, does it sell less because of the fact that Sony sells (or
at least has sold) Linux-developing packets for it?
-Aero
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> And if they released the specs for that kind of device to the 3rd party
> members could, that 3rd party could make better software even faster and
> generate bigger sales for that current product.
Hmm, then some 3rd party releases firmware to copy DRM protected songs to
non-DRM protected format using the hardware, and the OEM gets sued to
bankruptcy for promoting such software to be developed :-)
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scott wrote:
>
> Hmm, then some 3rd party releases firmware to copy DRM protected songs
> to non-DRM protected format using the hardware, and the OEM gets sued to
> bankruptcy for promoting such software to be developed :-)
>
Well yes. Also Intel and AMD should be sued for selling processors able
to do calculation needed in such things. Not to mention OS developers
(MS, Apple, various Linux groups, Linus himself, etcetc) for making a
software base that makes its part on making copying stuff possible. And
harddrive makers, for making devices to *store* such illegal copies! Oh
my, how can those companies do this for the community, it's so bad!
-Aero
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Invisible wrote:
> Both of those only support graphics. A game also needs sound, complex
keyboard access, realtime control, etc., all of which varies by platform.
I have often wondered how much of the development effort of a game goes into
1) Overall concept
2) Level design
3) Art and sound and motion capture and etc assets
4) Portable (like AI) coding, and
5) Engine-specific (DirX vs OpenGL) coding.
It really would seem to me that porting the graphics to a different platform
for a relatively large game (like, say, Half-life) would be a fairly small
part of the problem.
>> Reverse-engineering is not generally illegal.
>
> Sure. The fact that the EULA says "you may not reverse engineer this"
doesn't make it illegal at all. No sir.
Not in the USA. Copyright law is federal law. EULAs are state law. Copyright
law overrides state contract law. See Prolock v Copywrite. This may all have
changed since DMCA, of course. I am not a lawyer.
> Given how painfully difficult it is just working out how to *use* the Win32 API,
Think of it as a full-time job, and it's not so hard.
> the chances of somebody correctly implementing a clone of it seem vanishingly small.
It doesn't have to be identical functionality. It only has to be "correct."
If everybody programming stuck exactly to the published documentation, you
wouldn't have to reverse-engineer anything at all. So all you have to figure
out is what undocumented behavior particular breaking programs are relying
on, and then make your code have the same results.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.
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