I've been developing a QEMU emulator for the iPod Classic 6G (Samsung S5L8702) that boots the original, unmodified Apple retailOS. Navigation, the disc, the screen, and the music library worked for a while, but the music player appeared partially rendered and without sound. There were four different errors, and the last one was my fault in a way that I found amusing enough to write about.

For months I've been trying to emulate the iPod Classic 6G I have in my drawer, without success. After a long time, I finally managed to get it running, although it's still somewhat rough. In QEMU, I managed to boot the original, unmodified Apple retailOS. Navigation, the disc, the screen, and the music library worked for a while, but the music player appeared partially rendered and without sound.

One thing we already know is that the firmware is from Apple and is encrypted, so there's no legal download. I have an iPod Classic 6G from 2008. With the help of Claude Code, I was able to create code to extract it using emCORE. I extracted the contents of the flash memory and decrypted the image myself.

and the boot ROM cannot be read from the running device. I confirmed the latter the hard way, and along the way, my iPod restarted several times (pressing the center and menu buttons for 5 seconds to restart it).

There is no datasheet for the SoC. Each model register that allows unlocking some part of the guest is derived from a write operation performed by the guest itself,

Code and notes, including the ~16 hypotheses I had to retract along the way