I bought this Rome UP-301 MP3 Player device sometime in early 2000. It featured a staggering 32MB memory, and a very useful ability for the time: put it into your car stereo (most of which were still using cassettes) and your MP3s will play!
Sure 32MB was not much, but since you had to load your MP3s through a parallel interface that’s about as much as you could load in a reasonable time. And despite these limitations, this device was really awesome.
What was less awesome, was the Windows-only driver. Hence I went through the labor of understanding the parallel protocol and writing a command-line tool that loaded MP3s from Linux.
This program should allow you to communicate with the Rome UP-301 MP3 player under (probably) any *nix OS. It has been tested and is known to work under GNU/Linux.
Please note that this program only supports the UP-301 model. It is the first released of the rome players that plugs into your parallel port. Further models (USB ones) are not supported, and will probably never be by this program, as I don’t own any of them.
Many thanks to Dmitri Katchalov for his precious help during the development.
This program has been quickly released. It only offers minimal features in terms of interface and would need to be cleaned up, but I lack of time to do it right now. In clear, this is just what I needed. All instructions you should need are in the README file.
Requirements
Any Posix compliant *nix system should be able to run this software. You will need root rights to run it however, as it directly accesses your parallel port.
Downloads
- Romenux 0.1 (2002/01/17): romenux-0.1.tar.gz
No git repository because the last release occured in 2002, duh.