Programming for the iPod with Clicking Wheel

Question

Hello, some years ago I bought a brand new iPod Video (now known as iPod Classic) with an hard drive of 30GB. Now, after it has been unused for ages, I decided to replace its built-in battery and do something good out of it.

Unfortunately, although there are some games for it in the iTunes Store, some of which really good, I can't find any documentation on how to develop for it. Together with the iPod Nano it falls under the common name of "iPods with Clicking Wheel" but as far as I know there are no SDKs for them. I suspect that the solution is more trivial than I'm thinking.

Any suggestions?

Thank you
Tommaso

Answer 1

From what I can remember, the SDK for those iPods were closed to public development.

Only selected games houses could make games for them by working directly with Apple. They were usually "name brands" like Tetris, Peggle, Solitaire, etc.

Here's an article that describes it.

Answer 2

You could put Rockbox on the iPod (very easy to do) and then write games for Rockbox.

A good starting point (after installing Rockbox and playing with it) would be to look at the For Developers articles in the wiki.

Good luck!