Button combinations

[MostHated]

I just wanted to share that I came across the fact that if you hold the top 4 left buttons (excluding the recessed button) and then boot it, it seems to go into a different mode that shows up under lsusb. I am not well versed in the hardware side of things, so the info you have on here already might mean that you know this already, but just wanted to let you know.

Thanks, -MH

[mekanoe]

This got me a little farther

In Windows, it showed up as "GX-CHIP", which after installing the AMLogic USB driver, ended up showing up as a real device called "WorldCup Device". It seems AMLogic flashing tools could potentially work from here, but I'm thinking the bootloader is pretty significantly locked away from us.

The AML tooling on Windows has a place for a "password" binary input but obviously we don't have these for this device yet...

[risograph]

you hold the top 4 left buttons (excluding the recessed button)

not high priority addition, just wanted to provide a visual for this

[bwool1]

Playing around with this approach, just figured I would share my experience... I got the same results as @kayteh above. Here's what I did:

• Holding all four buttons, plugged in and saw the "GX-CHIP" in 'other devices' under device manager on Windows 10.
• Installed AMLogic USB Burning Tool v3.2.0, which included the correct driver to have it recognized as a "WorldCup Device." Had to install that driver again manually to get it to show up (there are instructions to do this built into the program - open the document under About > Help).
• Once the device manager showed it as a "WorldCup Device," the AMLogic USB Burning Tool v3.2.0 gave me an error message about not being compatible with the device and tries to find a backup install in a "V2" folder.
• Turns out you actually need AMLogic USB Burning Tool v2.2.0 to work with the car thing, so I installed that in the same directory folder and named its containing folder "V2". It functions as a backup which gets switched to when v3.2.0 doesn't work, apparently. I'd probably just start with installing v2.2.0 if I were doing it again, since I assume that would work from the beginning.

The tool now shows a connected device, but not much else. No apparent option to pull an image from the device, just an option to import and burn a new one to the device. Connected device line in software doesn't disappear or throw an error if you pull the plug on it.

Another note: once you plug in the car thing to USB with all four buttons held down, it will connect with your computer until you remove and re-add power without holding down the buttons (because it will boot normally in that case).

[mekanoe]

Yo! This gets us pretty far, there's some ROMs for these AMLogic devices we might be able to leverage, especially if we can just get the bare minimum of a kernel going.

[AppointMike]

I would love to help and get this thing hacked open

[JordanEJ]

I have a Gopro Karma remote controller which also shows up as WorldCup device. It runs a custom version of android but can be flashed with full android. Not sure it this is much help but as @kayteh said there is the possibility of a custom rom for this device.

[everettperiman]

Can confirm that the aforementioned steps worked for me as well.

[JordanEJ]

Found this: https://github.com/frederic/superbird-bulkcmd

Not sure how much it helps.