[E3-hacking] Hello!

[David Given]

Some models can be reflashed with stock Linux using various poorly
documented and largely forgotten tools; the Linux distribution is here:
http://the.earth.li/pub/e3/ and there's some writeup on it here:
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/hardware-e3.html

The downside is that that Linux distribution is actually built with
OpenEmbedded and won't run binaries built anywhere else, which is
irritating. I have successfully run Debian on an E3 via a USB hub with a
hard drive attached by simply cross-installing the userland from a PC and
then configuring u-boot on the emailer to boot from it. However the
emailer's only got 32MB of RAM so whatever you do it's going to have to be
very lightweight. Finding a sufficiently old userland might be hard, too
--- it'll need to work with a 2.6.19 kernel.

Also, Amstrad eventually locked down the bootloader and later versions
can't be flashed. If you have one of those, you may be out of luck.

You'll also need to build a serial cable. The signals are TTL 5V, except
*inverted*, so 0V = logic 1 and 5V = logic 0 (it's intended to be passed
directly to a level shifter).

The best thing you can probably do with one of these is to use it as a dumb
terminal --- USB ethernet devices work just fine with the OpenEmbedded
distribution, so you may be able to telnet into (or out of) it. The phone's
supported as an ordinary modem but I don't think I ever got it to work.

I'd suggest building the cable, trying to install the OpenEmbedded
distribution above, and seeing what happens. It's not like you can make it
less useful...

On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 at 11:28, Adam Ainsworth <adam.ainsworth at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Came across this list while looking for hacking info on the Emailer. It's
> a bit out of my usual area of interest, normally I'm playing with 8-bit
> computers and old PC-alikes.
>
> I got an Emailer Plus in new condition about a while back, but forgot
> about it until recently when I picked up a Pocket Dockit to go with it. I
> just fired it up to see what it could do, and that turned out to
> be...nothing! I watched the Chinnyvision video on it, and he came to the
> same conclusion.
>
>  https://youtu.be/aY6R72nWJsU
>
> I did find a couple of articles, although one (where the author appeared
> to have Linux running on it) is presumably by someone on this list, given
> the URL. There was also mention of hooking up a Raspberry Pi to it. I'm
> also wondering if a wifi modem would do the trick, although presumably we'd
> need to know how the server software worked if it did connect.
>
> Without me going through all of the list archives, can someone just give
> me a quick update on the current status of hacking it? Has someone found a
> way in, or have I wasted £12 or so on the hardware?
>
> Thanks very much!
>
> Adam
>
> ========
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>


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