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Comment by demondemidi | Hacker News Reader

Sure skipped over a lot of details. Like how did they reprogram the iPod code to play the boot rom as Audio? Why not just desolder the flash chip and read it out with a programmer?

EDIT: I missed the fact that there was already a "Linux on iPod" distro to build upon.

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Found this:

http://www.ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo

    I got an iPod for christmas. The ipodlinux project was one of the main reasons for my choice and so I started exploring the iPod as far as I was able to. I patched the bootloader and got some basic code to run but there was no way to access any hardware other than the two CPUs yet. To get the LCD, Clickwheel and the harddisk working we needed to reverse engineer the bootloader in the flashrom. But to do that we first had to find a way to get that code. Seems quite impossible without any knowlegde about the IO-Hardware but I found a solution...

Not an expert, but my read of the article was that he had code execution already, but needed to dump the bootloader so he could gain access to peripherals. You could no doubt pull the chip and read it out with a programmer: this has been done for many other devices, i have no trouble believing you could do the same with an iPod. The method he developed is noninvasive, though, simply requiring a soundproof box and some analysis software. Thats what makes it cool, to me.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39244679

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