• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Looking for help on project involving flashing an android

Ethan Manzi

Lurker
Jun 18, 2017
2
1
Hello, thank you for taking the time to read this post. I've been wanting to work on a project for quite a while now, in various forms. Essentially, I want to create a mini-arcade system. Yes, I know theses already exist, and I'd save so much headache by using an existing one. However, I love computer science and programming, and I really want to do this myself, for fun, experience, and overall, the satisfaction of knowing you built a working product. I've looked at many platforms for this, and the one I still want to do ( it has been delayed a lot, because I needed to find proper schematics, find microchips that'll work, and make sure everything will fit together properly, minding the costs ) is to retrofit a Gameboy Advanced SP with some modern hardware, so I can play custom games, use a emulator to play Gameboy games, along with other similar games.

However, I figured, let's step back for a second. Since that is going to involving working with physical hardware, something I don't do often, and a bunch of schematics ( since I wish to keep the display ), I figured let's use something cheap, common, and I already have. A spare Android phone. I have this tiny old Samsung phone, which serves me just about zero use, since I can't update it to the latest Android, it doesn't do me much good for app development, it's somewhat low specs, so I can't use it for too much gaming, and it's incompatible with my network, so I can't use it as a backup phone.

So, I've been trying to research various components, questions, etc. I have for this project. No luck. That's why I decided to post my request for help here. So, main request, is I need somebody(s) to help me find out how to do a few things with this old phone, which is a Samsung Galaxy Core Prime [SM-G360V]. Firstly, the easiest to find, I need to flash it. With what? This leads into my second and more complex request. I don't want to use Android. I am going down to as low as I can, developing a full OS ( in part, because as I said, I wish to port this to other platforms, creating an OS for Raspberry PI, normal x86_64 computers, and the custom build Gameboy ). Where can I find resources on this? I should be able to find info on developing a cross-compiler, but what I haven't really been able to find, is how to interact with the devices components. I'm assuming that I need to know the specific interrupts to call to access them, but I can't find the information on that. The main things I can think of needing, are the display, bluetooth, wifi, the power and volume control, the internal storage ( of course), and the buttons. However, if possible, being able to use NFC, cameras, etc.

I know that I seem really noob-ish in this post, and am asking a lot. This is a project I've been trying to work on for a long time now, but I can't seem to get the details I need to get started. I know that developing a full OS is anything but easy, but I've wanted it to learn to do things like make OSes since I began programming ( that was about age ... eight, I think, with Visual Basic ). I've been learning assembly, C, and how processors work in general.

Any resources you can provide will be very very appreciated. Until I can get this done, I may have to settle for somewhat poor performance on Android, and having to write everything within an application. Ugh.

Thanks in advanced. If you need any clarifications, since I know I kinda rambled ( sorry, by brain is terrible at that ).
 

BEST TECH IN 2023

We've been tracking upcoming products and ranking the best tech since 2007. Thanks for trusting our opinion: we get rewarded through affiliate links that earn us a commission and we invite you to learn more about us.

Smartphones