Hacking the Neo Car MP3 Jukebox Player

This hack will allow you to customize the text that displays on your Neo Mp3 player. I was sick and tired of seing the "www.ssiamerica.com" banner fly across my player everytime I power up. I then decided to research and hack this baby until I got my desired results. It is verrrrry easy to do all you need is a Text editor, Or better yet a Hex Code editor. So without further ado:

Step ONE: go to http://www.ssiamerica.com/downloads.shtml

download the Firmware update.

Step TWO: Decompress zipped file and you should have a file titled NEO35 or NEO35.BIN

Step THREE: Open this file up with your text editor. I used Vi (Unix/MacOSX) Others could use BB-Edit (MacOS) Wordpad (although complications may occur) (Win9X) If you have your favorite hex editor you can use that too.(suggested)

Step FOUR: Here is the easy part! Simply locate the text "www.ssiamerica.com" and feel free to change it to whatever you want....Almost. The real trick here is that you can't exceed the 18 character limit. If all you want to say in place of www.ssiamerica.com is "Hello" then fill the rest in with spaces. After you have done that you are free to save the file and up it to your NeoMp3 player. To update firmware on these units mount the hard-drive on your computer and copy your hacked version of Firmware to the unit. Now unplug the unit from the computer, and holding the program keydown, power up the unit. Next hit play, then hit select....at this point the unit will restart and your text will appear. If you Messed up you will have a blank display. To remedy that re-install the firmware update...the unhacked one!!! (Duh) :)

Enjoy!

*You can change the text to just about anything on your player...you can even change the controls text!! Just as long as you follow the character syntax, you will be ok.