Soul Of The Prestige

It appears that getting Windows Mobile 6.5 on the phone may be a lot harder than expected. Even using PPCKitchen.org’s BuildOS (an excellent user friendly kitchen), I’ve run into the same problems as before with this phone. What’s more, I mysteriously spoiled my Windows XP installation leaving me without a way to produce a ROM of any build for the phone. I’ll try and get Windows XP working again by the end of the weekend and publish two new posts.

I haven’t made any inroads during the 5+ months that I’ve been working on a port of Windows Mobile 6.5 for my Vogue. As of today, I will use PPCKitchen.org’s BuildOS for building my ROMs which should make testing OEMs very simple and effortless. It will however be quite hard to get anyone to use it due to the fact that one can easily build their own ROM using the same program. I’ll try porting from scratch again in a few weeks. Time to start enjoying this phone again.

Just completed the second trial in the Alpha 100 stage of the ROM’s development. This build now has the Bronze (Titanium) and CHome (default Titanium plug-in) packages. The mui file for the CHome_Lang_0804 will have to be modified for anything to show up in English but that will be done later. The Base_Lang_0804 package has been replaced with the original Base_Lang_0409 package to increase usability while testing later Alpha 100 builds. nueMassStorage v1.3 and nueStorageManager v1.1 have been added in as well for when my computer and memory card reader cannot be used. It boots but doesn’t go past the third splash screen. Onto the next trial then.

I’m currently working on a port of Windows Mobile Build 21222. It will take a couple of days for everything to fall into place and hopefully it (mostly) works the first time. The Base packages have been added including the DPI and RES packages. Needed to add the OEM_Lang_0409 package in order for the ROM to build properly. All that was required was the initflashfiles.dat file. Now on to the next trial.

I finally got a ROM built that I can now use as a base for the new ROMs that will be built using WM6.5 Build 21500 although such triumph wasn’t to come without some distress and then more triumph. The ROM contains a ported XIP with the original SYS along with the original OEMDRIVERS package to allow the ROM to boot up completely resulting in a surprisingly fast (as if the phone was overclocked) UI. This morning though, Windows could not see the card and after removing and reinserting the card into the reader I decided to try TestDisk. It didn’t work. PhotoRec? Worked like a charm and retrieved most of the files that were on that ‘lost’ partition with the exception of the ROMs that were stored on the card. All that’s left to do now (as I already flashed the original Bell ROM back on it) is to put on my PIM data and do the simple settings changes. Installing programs can wait.

…While trying to cook a good ROM for my Vogue. Since the last post, I’ve moved onto Build 21500 and have begun experimenting with the OEM packages from the Jade’s ROMs as they are much more well laid out. The latest build I put together (26) unfortunately does not get past the second splash screen and without my card reader (which I lost at school), I am stuck with a paperweight. As this my only device running Windows Mobile, I am forced to do without it for some time. While I work on getting a replacement MicroSD card reader to replace the one I misplaced, I’ll be working on a UI for WM6.5.

I will be taking a small hiatus for a few days while I relax my mind and refrain from trying any extreme porting and cooking techniques. I was able to manually port the 21109 XIP today thanks to garfieldau’s XIPAddrTools 2.0 which can be found on this thread. Having gained the knowledge need to port the XIP, I’ll try and work on removing the ULDR as seen in this thread as well as increasing the RAM as seen in these two posts AFTER I come back from hiatus. I will most likely be implementing some changes to the site to increase ranking on Google as well as put up some ads.

The porting of the 21109 SYS went horribly 16 times in a row. After seeing what other ROM chefs like NFSFAN are capable of as well as having to deal with school and my own personal frustrations, I’m having a bit of trouble staying motivated. I usually jump around a lot as well when dealing with any type of project which is fine. Starting from scratch, despite being very much undesirable maybe warranted later on as I want to provide something technically advanced in all its aspects. I’ll just do what I can and Keep Moving Forward.

Wrong drivers though (I think…). After working hard on the errors that popped up while trying to build the a ROM containing my previously ported 21109 XIP with the 21109 SYS that I had finished porting last night, I finally finished building a new ROM (3rd build). It is the second ROM built after Alpha 100 which was the first ROM I built. You can view the changelog here. What’s unfortunate is that the ROM doesn’t even boot past the second splash screen. Either the drivers are wrong or I may either have to replace the boot.rgu file with one from the 21109 XIP, the user.hv and default.hv files with ones from the 19208 (Bell Mobility) SYS, or I’ll have to replace the 21109 OEMDrivers with one from 19208 (Bell Mobility) SYS. Will have to take a look at it. More to come later today after I get a Beta 200 working.

And working too! It hasn’t come easily though. After reading up on XIP and SYS porting in the past not to mention having flashed the best OEM ROM for my Vogue yet and (luckily enough) finding the 21109 XIP and SYS, I decided to try my hand at manual porting. That didn’t last long as it takes a lot of work and the XIPPort program kept throwing up errors every time I tried merging the two XIPs. XIPPorterEX (various revisions) also threw up a few errors of it’s own. It was not until recently that I finally got it to port them. The way of checking is whether the XIPs that are to be ported are of good quality is to use XIPPort. The process is quite simple and will help immensely in trying to port them no matter how that process is carried out.
After having extracted the os.nb.payload file from the original ROM and then extracted the xip.bin file from that (making sure put aside the os.nb.payload file for later operations!), open the XIPPort program (it should be in the same folder as ONE of the xip.bin files along with the pkgcommon.dll file that XIPPort is usually packaged with) and click dump xip.bin. There usually aren’t any errors at this point and a folder called OUT will show up in the folder where xip.bin is located. Clicking on make pkgs next should have created the proper folders inside of the OUT folder without errors. If there are errors then delete the xip.bin and os.nb.payload and try again. If XIPPort did ‘make pkgs’ without errors then the write maps button should be clicked. If there are errors then delete the xip.bin and os.nb.payload and try again. If XIPPort was able to do all this without crashing, then move onto the next xip.bin file taken from the donor ROM (if there was one) and repeat the same steps with XIPPort.
Once there are no more deviations in the xip.bin files, the porting process can be started. This can be done using XIPPort and the tools outlined to go through Ameet’s excellent Manual Full XIP Porting Tutorial or by using ervius’ wonderful (and preferred) XIPPorterEX v1.2 Rev 37 either on its own or in ervius’ Visual Multilang Kitchen.
I now have to start working on the 21109 SYS that I (almost) completely translated which will be talked about in another post. Happy Porting!