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.

…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.

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!

Now that I’ve fixed my phone, I’ve decided to finally start working on some solutions for my phone’s short comings, mainly to do with power consumption, hardware support and the UI. I already started working on it and it will fall under the name The Prestige Project. In the coming weeks ahead, I’ll be adding pages, links, pictures and posts so that anyone reading this blog can become enlightened in the art of Windows Mobile ROM and program development and hacking.

As I posted in an earlier post, I had received the casing that same day. It is exactly like in the picture and I mean exactly. As happy as I am with the new casing, it appears to made only for the GSM/WiFi model of the HTC Touch (Elf/Elfin) and not the CDMA variant (Vogue). That stated, I’m quite happy with my purchase and I hope to get this working with my phone soon. Here are the pictures I promised:

If you had read the previous post, you would know that I’ve ordered a new housing and digitizer to replace the ones currently on the phone. The reason for replacing them is mainly because of this:

The problem area is located in the lower right corner of the picture (where you see the darkened splotches of the screen). It made sense to completely replace the entire housing as well as the digitizer since it would only cost a few dollars extra. I’ll post new pictures once the package arrives with the new housing and digitizer.

Update: The package arrived in the mail today! I’ll be working on the phone over the weekend in preparation for next week. Except to see more pictures soon.

Bought a new housing for my HTC Touch (VOGU100 aka Vogue) last night on eBay. I purchased it from post2all for a total of $48.73 CDN. According to the receipt I received from PayPal, $31.95 CDN went to the actual housing itself, $14.37 CDN was shipping and handling, while $2.40 CDN went to shipping insurance. Hopefully I’ll receive the package in a couple of weeks. Here’s a picture of what I should be receiving:

htc-touch-p3450-housing