feature phone preservation

like mentioned on the main page, i participate in a feature phone preservation project and help run similarly-aligned social media accounts named Old Phone Preservation.
see below to check out what my specific role(s) in this project have been. they are wordy and long winded!

this page is still under construction!

these photos show the general process i take for backing up the firmware from a feature phone.
first, if necessary, i use a JTAGulator to help find hidden and unlabeled JTAG test pads on a a phone’s logic board. then i connect the phone to a “RIFF Box” service device, making use of the same JTAG debug interface found before. from there, i can use it to make a complete copy of the firmware stored in the device’s flash storage. importantly, i upload this online to the ROMphonix “dumbphone repo” so that anyone can access and use the firmware image for their own purposes. most people in that community tend to use the firmware images to reverse engineer their proprietary graphics formats, or extract their graphics and sounds for those that are interested in that sort of thing.

i also help maintain this community-driven portable device wiki which has several guides for modifying feature phones, as well as detailed pages on older portable devices themselves.