iPod Video Modding Tutorial

What we will do

You don't have to do all of these things listed above if you don't want to, so let me tell you a bit more about them.

iPodWizard is a tool to change the images and text on your iPod. Even if you have no interest in putting other software on your iPod, you might still be interested in personalising your iPod with iPodWizard. You can also download and apply themes which other people have made.

Rockbox is a great alternative operating system for your iPod. With Rockbox you can play many different audio formats (e.g. FLAC), view text files and view pictures. It has games including chess, Doom (yes really) and a remake of that flash helicopter game. It also has a text editor, a graphics editor and heaps more. For more information on what Rockbox can do, click here here, and for a list of the plugins click here. Plugins are included with Rockbox and don't need to be downloaded.

iPodLinux is another alternative operating system. On it's own, it does not have many features, however many more modules can be downloaded. The importance of installing iPodLinux in this tutorial however is because the installer I will use will also install iPodLoader. iPodLoader lets you pick what you want to boot into when your iPod is restarted.

iBoy is a faster Gameboy emulator than the emulator included with Rockbox. However, you may prefer the Rockbox emulator, as it can run certain games (especially adventure games and games not requiring fast control) at a reasonable speed and keeps the original aspect ratio. Both emulators can run Gameboy Color games.

Wikipodia is Wikipedia on your iPod! Yep, all of the text and it even has the internal linkage structure for browsing the massive Wikipedia library. Very cool indeed.

If you do not want to install all of these things, you should probably still install iPodLinux because of iPodLoader.

Before you get started

This guide was made for the 5th generation iPod Video, however lots of it may be applicable to other iPod models.

This method of installing iPodLinux and everything else should not delete anything off your iPod (in tech speak, it means that it won't partition your iPod's hard drive). However, things could got wrong, and although there is pretty much always a way to get things back to normal, your music and other data stored on your iPod might not survive. To get music off your iPod for backup before continuing with this tutorial, try using YamiPod.

And of course, I am not responsible for anything you do to your iPod. Doing the things in this tutorial will void your warranty. You should probably know a bit about computers before you embark on this tutorial.

Before you start modding your iPod, connect your iPod to your computer, open up iTunes, select your iPod, click on Enable disk use and click Apply.

iPodWizard

Ok, enough of that boring stuff. Let's get modding!

There are lots of things that can be changed with iPodWizard. For this tutorial, I'll only change the "Do not disconnect" screen, feel free to have as much fun with this program as you want.

Plug in your iPod if you haven't already.

First of all, download and unzip iPodWizard. Now open up iPodWizard.exe.

Select iPod in the Edit Mode menu. Click Load iPod Firmware.

Before doing anything else, it's probably a good idea to save a copy of the original iPod firmware in case you have too much fun with iPodWizard and mess something. Select the Updater tab.

The firmware extraction process could take a while.

At the bottom of the window, click on Extract firmware binary from your iPod.

Now, back to the modding.

Under Firmware editor, select the Pictures tab. Scroll down the Index menu and select 368.

You might want to save the image using the Save bitmap button and edit it in an image editor, or just make your own 100 by 100 pixel bitmap image. Click on Load bitmap and go and find your work of art.

Next, let's change the "Do not disconnect" text.

Select the Strings tab. Scroll down the Lang block menu and select 24.

Type in disconnect in the top text input box and click Find. This will highlight Do not disconnect.. Type something witty/use as many swear words as you can in the lower text input box and click Change String.

Click OK.

Now let's write the changes which we made to the iPod. Click the Write button.

Read what the note says, follow the instructions and click OK.

Click OK in the next box as well.

For more tutorials on iPodWizard, click here. For user-made themes, click here.

iPodLinux

Ok, now there are heaps of ways to install iPodLinux. There are methods which require you to run Linux off a CD, partition your iPod meaning you lose all of your music and people even make their own installers. I don't know every single way to install iPodLinux, but from what I've tried, this method seems to be the best at the moment for installing iPodLinux on a 5G iPod. If I'm incorrect, email me. It doesn't need Linux and it doesn't partition your iPod. It's not perfect, and you'll probably get a "sleeping forever" message on occasions, but it works. By the way, if/when you get a black screen with lots of red text and at the bottom it says "No more tasks for init - sleeping forever" while you're using iPodLinux, it simply means you have to restart your iPod. To restart your iPod, hold the center and menu button in for a while.

Anyway, back to installing iPodLinux. I'll be using an installer called iPodLinux Manager and I suggest you do the same.

Download iPodLinux Manager from here.

Unzip iPodLinuxManager.zip and run iPodLinux Manager.bat.

A black command box with come up as well as a window introducing iPodlinux Manager. Click on Next. The window will disappear and iPodLinux will install onto your iPod.

After it is finished, a window will appear. Click Finish. If you choose to eject your iPod and try out iPodLinux, go ahead, just boot back into the Apple OS (or disk mode) and plug your iPod back into your computer once you've finished.

Wikipodia

Open My Computer and double-click on your iPod.

Download and unzip Wikipodia.zip. Take the folder named Wikipodia and move it to your iPod's root directory (e.g. F:\).

Next, you'll need to download the Wikipedia library. This it a very large file, around 1.7GB. Download it from here. The latest version is from February 2007. By the way, we won't be installing "Encyclopodia" which is what that site is about, we will just be downloading it's library file.

Move the file wikipedia-en-20070206.epodia to:

iPod:\Wikipodia\encyclopodia\library

Done!

iBoy

Download iBoy from here. Unzip the file and move the file iboy_newkern to your iPod's root directory (e.g. F:/). The other files won't be used.

Next, download iboy_kernel.bin and also move this to your iPod's root directory.

Download this iboy.cfg (right click, "Save Link As...") file and again move it to the root of your iPod along with the other two files.

Create a new folder called gameboy in your iPod's root directory.

Open this folder, and inside it make two more folders, one named rom and the other named save.

Put your .gb and .gbc roms in the rom folder. The save data will be stored in the save folder.

For a list of what is and what isn't working on iBoy, see this list.

For free and legal ROMs, go to PDRoms.de.

Rockbox

Let's install Rockbox. If you plan on installing Rockbox on it's own without installing iPodLinux, you will need to follow a different tutorial (I suggest the Rockbox manual), because in this tutorial I'm using Rockbox with the iPodLinux bootloader.

Download the latest daily build of Rockbox from http://www.rockbox.org/daily.shtml.

Also download the latest fonts pack from the same page.

Unzip Rockbox and move the .rockbox folder to your iPod (IZArc can't extract the .rockbox folder for some reason, you might need to use another unzipping program).

Unzip the fonts pack to your iPod (the font files should be stored in iPod:\.rockbox\fonts).

Rockbox has now been installed!

Rockbox has plugins and viewers. To access the plugins, scroll down to plugins and press select. The viewers are a bit different. For example, if you wanted to play a .gbc rom or view a text file, select "Files" and navigate to that file on your iPod and press select. Exitting out of plugins varies from plugin to plugin. Some plugins may simply require you to press the menu button, some may require you to toggle the hold button on and off, or press the menu and select buttons at the same time. For more information, see the Rockbox manual and the Plugin index.

Doom

Rockbox has a Doom plugin. That's right, you can play Doom on your iPod. You can play Doom, Doom 2, Doom 2 - Plutonia Experiment and Doom 2 - TNT - Evilution. All of these are retail titles, and the WAD files can't be given away from here. However, you can legally download shareware Doom and Freedoom, which is a free remake of Doom 2.

To get Doom working, download rockdoom.wad. Make a folder in the .rockbox folder on your iPod called doom. Move rockdoom.wad to the doom folder.

Along with rockdoom.wad, you will need a game WAD. Download shareware Doom and/or Freedoom (complete IWAD). Alternatively you could use doom.wad, doom2.wad, plutonia.wad or tnt.wad if you have those games. Put these WAD files in iPod:\.rockbox\doom with rockdoom.wad.

As well as running Doom games, you can also run addons, or PWADS. When searching for addon WADs, make sure the don't use DeHackEd WADs, because you will not be able to play these on your iPod. If you find a good addon WAD which works with Rockbox, let me know!

To use an addon WAD, make a folder in your doom folder named addons and put the addon WADs in that folder.

Bootloader

Finally, we will need to configure the bootloader. This is how we will select what we want to boot into.

Open up Notepad (Start>All Programs>Accessories>Notepad) and copy and paste the folowing:

Apple OS @ ramimg
iPodLinux @ (hd0,1)/linux.bin
Rockbox @ (hd0,1)/.rockbox/rockbox.ipod
iBoy @ (hd0,1)/iboy_kernel.bin /mnt/iboy_newkern
Wikipodia @ (hd0,1)/linux.bin /mnt/Wikipodia/wikizilla
Disk Mode @ diskmode
Sleep @ standby

Click File and Save as. Name the file loader.cfg

You can change the order of the list items, as well as change the names.

You can also change other settings. When putting these commands into the loader.cfg, put it in this format: setting = value

default - This is the first item selected when the iPod is reset. For example, with the above loader.cfg file, setting the default value to 3 would keep the order of the list, however the first selected list item would be Rockbox. The default value is 1.

timeout - This is the amount of time in seconds it will take for it to automatically select the default option. For example, with a default value of 5 and a timeout value of 30, Wikipodia will automatically be selected if the iPod is not touched for 30 seconds. Scrolling to another selection will void the timeout. Setting a value of 0 will disable timeout.

backlight - Set this to 1 to have the backlight on or 0 to have it off. The default value is 1.

bg_color - This is the menu background color. This uses the format of (red,green,blue) with a range of 0 to 255. For example, (128,0,128) would be purple. To help you pick a colour, you can use Paint to select a color and you will see the RGB value. The default value is (0,255,128).

hilight_color - This is the menu selection and progress bar color. The default value is (128,128,0).

bg_gradient - Set this to 0 to have a plain background or 1 to have a gradient ranging from black to the bg_color. The default value is 1.

beep_duration - This is the duration of the startup beep in milliseconds (1/1000 of a second). The default value is 50. Setting the value to 0 will disable the beep and the clickwheel sound.

beep_period - This is the pitch of the beep. The lower the value the higher the frequency. It is recommended that this is between 20 and 40. The default value is 30.

Make sure you don't have any spaces after the lines of text. You can add a comment to a loader.cfg file by starting a line with # and writing your comment after that, or you could also use the # symbol to split up the list of applications from the settings. Other settings can be found here

Here is an example of a loader.cfg file you could use:

Apple OS @ ramimg
iPodLinux @ (hd0,1)/linux.bin
Rockbox @ (hd0,1)/.rockbox/rockbox.ipod
iBoy @ (hd0,1)/iboy_kernel.bin /mnt/iboy_newkern
Wikipodia @ (hd0,1)/linux.bin /mnt/Wikipodia/wikizilla
Disk Mode @ diskmode
Sleep @ standby
#
backlight = 1
default = 3
timeout = 15
bg_color = (5,90,160)
bg_gradient = 1
hilight_color = (160,200,50)
beep_duration = 20
beep_period = 35

Ejecting and resetting

To eject your iPod, right click on the Safely Remove Hardware icon on the system tray.

Click Safely Remove Hardware.

You will see a list of the connected removable devices. Click on USB Mass Storage Unit and click Stop. If you have multiple USB mass storage devices plugged into your computer, don't worry, you can see if you've selected your iPod after pressing Stop.

A window should appear with the text Apple iPod USB Device. Click OK.

To restart your iPod, press the Menu and Select (middle) button at the same time and hold them pressed for about 6 seconds.

You will need to restart your iPod everytime you want to switch between operating systems. For more information on key combinations, click here.

Congratulations! Now you've got the awesomest iPod around! If you have any comments or suggestions about the tutorial, please email me so I can revise the tutorial and make it better.

Have fun!