Game Controllers as 3D Input Device

This is a cheap hack, but may be useful to you. I use 3D CAD programs frequently. Navigating three dimensions with a 2D interface (mouse) is annoying. The UI in Pro/E, for example, requires either clicking different modes to pan/zoom/rotate, or holding various key+mouse click combos. The interface is improved by something like these.

You can achieve much the same effect, however, with any USB game controller with two analog thumbsticks. I used a knockoff Xbox controller and joy2key to map the controller inputs. I've set left analog stick to rotate, right stick to pan, triggers to zoom. Now I can perform fly-throughs in one motion.

Zune Hacking

What I know:

Zune boot process:
imx31L loads Eboot.bin from ROM to protected on-cpu memory
Strips Verisign certificate, decrypts SHA-1 hash of image with on-cpu public key
computes SHA-1 of loaded image, compares to above.
If equal, Eboot loads NK.bin from system partition of HD
If not, Load Recovery.bin*1, whose only functionality is to connect (sync?) to pc, and
reload valid firmware.

Update Process:
I'm not clear if any verification happens when updating or not. Does the pc side check? The device? Both? Does the device verify before writing updates, or let the boot-time check catch
unauthenticated code?


Notes:

*1: I'm not clear on what gets loaded from where. Eboot is on the flash ROM. But where is Recovery.bin? One reference has it in ROM, the other says hard drive.

References:

Hardware info from
http://www.bunniestudios.com/wordpress/?p=131
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=6848.0

Info on the imx31L ( the security features pdf is specially recommended)
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?nodeId=02XPgQ821729733642&tid=WMSG200506VANITYIMX31

Info on boot process and hard drive
http://zunerama.com/forum/index.php?&topic=1273.0
http://www.zuney.net/zune-hacks-mods/258-bad-news-firmware-hacking.html