Monthly Archives: July 2011

Cowon Emulator status

This post is mainly for my self, if you don’t have the basic understanding of how to make UCI’s for the Cowon this post wont make much sense.
I’ve been busy at work lately, so I haven’t really gotten as far as I wanted on my Cowon J3 & S9 emulator. But I’ll write a quick status update here and which problems I’ve encountered.

As it turns out, my understanding of how the device worked was very limited, and some of what I knew turned out to be wrong. My main fault was not understanding how the launcher.swf worked. It turns out that I only need to implement the ext_fscommand2 functions and not the functions starting with “gn_” (I found references to this function in some decompiled UCI’s). The “gn_” functions are in the launcher.swf which I simply load from the emulator (I had implemented about 25% of the launcher.swf in my emulator before I realized this :().

I’ve also figured out how I will make the file listing, or I’m down to 2 ideas. Both ideas include an AIR application that reads the device folders (which is going to be fun because I’ve never made an AIR application before).
The first solution (the one I’ll probably end up using), will have the application save an XML file with the folder and file structure. This XML is then loaded by the emulator and used to mimic the file system, requiring a manual update of the filesystem every time a file is changed (but like on the actual device the files don’t change that often).

After I get the filesystem up and running, it should be rather easy to emulate the actual playing of an MP3. But then again I thought a lot of the things that caused trouble in this project would’ve been easy.

Another thing I’ll give it a week or to and see if I get started up on the emulator again, if I don’t I’ll just release it in it’s current form, so you can see how it works for yourself. The current form however is a not to well documented and still in progress, set of classes with no actual UI everything I change I do code time.