hp digitial entertainment center de100c/de200c

hi, welcome to robert rose's dec hacking page. here i'll be storing information of interest to current or potential dec hackers.

disclaimer: what you do with your dec is your business. keep in mind that doing most anything with your dec outside of pushing the buttons on the front will most likely void your warranty. you are responisble for your own actions.

essential links

mailing lists

hacking the radio station tunerdb

Using a combination of tcpdump and roxy proxy I managed to reverse engineer the tuner database format the dec pulls down from Real. I set up a server running PHP and MySQL to serve up my own radio station database so that the dec community can contribute new radio stations and purge ones that no longer work.

upgrading the dec

the dec comes with a single 64mb pc100 stick of ram. by experimentation various folks on the dec-list mailing list have discovered that the de100c is capable of being upgraded to 512mb ram by installing two sticks of 256mb pc100. the de200c is capable of only 256mb, as it has only one slot for ram.

the dec comes with a 566MHz celeron. both dec models are capable of running up to a 1.4GHz socket 370 pentium 3 cpu. the dec is only capable of running it's processor at 100mhz fsb, so any cpu you attempt to install must have a 100mhz fsb. 1.4GHz 100mhz fsb pentium 3's are extremely rare-- Intel made very few. you'll probably have an easier time locating a 1.0GHz pentium 3.

the de100c comes with a 40gb hard drive, the de200c comes with a 20gb. both can easily be upgraded. to perform an upgrade, you first need to "unlock" your dec. once it's unlocked, replace the hard drive with your new one and run the "fsInstall" cd. this cd is available off of ftp.hp.com. this procedure is described in further detail on lee devlin's pages.

dec hacking photos

for your viewing enjoyment: link

running windoze

for whatever reason, you may want to install windows on your dec. for me, it was because i wanted to be able to play stepmania on my television and view divx movies.

i've sucessfully installed windows me and windows 2000 on my dec. others have installed windows xp with sucess. no one has been able to install windows 98 or 98se as these require a ps/2 keyboard to complete configuration. installing windows is simple-- replace the hard drive and boot off of the install disc.

once your dec is running windows, you may notice that you're missing a few nice features: you've rendered the remote and front panel buttons useless, the front panel display (vfd) no longer does anything useful, and you're missing your mp3 management software. never fear! people in the dec community have figured out how to get most of this functionality back.