On Friday, 27 March 2020, 20:11:38 CET, Solomon Peachy via rockbox-dev <rockbox-dev@cool.haxx.se> wrote:
IMO it makes more sense to finally bite the bullet and formally retire the Archose targets, and all HWCODEC stuff while we're at it. > I own an Archos XS-202, still going well, the only player for which I did not > feel the need Rockbox, were it available. If I owned an older Archos target > and had installed Rockbox on it, all I would need is to have some kind of > access maintained to whichever release or build working on it. Just to make > sure I can still install it in case of a hard reset. > The same applies to all targets which have been working reasonnably well even > those which never reached the "stable" status. For instance the Cowon D2 > which work perfectly well. Many such old players are hard stuff, last for decades and can be repaired easily. The critical parts are the line out/earphones socket, usb/charging port and the battery. Thanks to the touchscreen, buttons may fail but the targets may remain usable. Targets such as the Clip+ or Clip zip, on the other hand, will die much younger I'm afraid. Repairing them looks like expert DIYing. Tiny resoldering is probably a pain. I manage to keep mine working by using a remote earphones socket.
