Patches for Non-EZ ROMs, old small ROMs, and Japanese ROMs Released | May 29, 2001 |
You may have noticed the bug that romeo doesn't set up boot pointers in the
small ROM correctly. This patch fixes that problem. To use the fix, you will
need to pass the correct card header version of the small ROM to romeo during
the assembly stage. To check which card header version you have, run
romeo -h my.romand look for the line in the small ROM info that gives the card header version (not the same as Version). There is a new -S flag so you can specify which version you need (before, it defaulted to header version 4 when assembling PalmOS 3.5 and higher). Another option that you might need is the -n option, for non-ez ROMs. Previously, reassembling non-ez Palms didn't work. To check if you have a non-ez Palm, just look at the flag information in the large ROM card header. The last option is the -L "JP" option for Japanese ROMs. If you have a ROM which is not Japanese or US/English, please mail the output of romeo -N to mmc@cs.berkeley.edu. In summary, try the following command if romeo hasn't been working for you: romeo -a <PalmOS version> -l <large ROM prcs>/* -s <small ROM prcs>* -o new.rom [-n] [-S <version> ] [-L <"JP"|"US">] |
|
Romeo 0.5.0 Released | March 17, 2001 |
This is the intial release of Romeo. It now satisfies all the authors' basic needs, and seems quite stable. Although it is listed as alpha-quality, we believe it is in beta (we're just covering our behinds in case we're wrong). It currently supports all ROM and Palm versions we know of, and never crashes. |
Romeo can perform a myriad of actions. The following tutorial
takes you through the process of building a custom ROM step-by-step.
% pi-getrom /dev/pilot pilot.rom
You should now have a file called pilot.rom. This is
your ROM image.
% mkdir prcs.small
% mkdir prcs.big
% cd prcs.small
% romeo -xsi ../pilot.rom
The -xsi means "extract the PRCs in the small ROM from input file ../pilot.rom." To get the large ROM PRCs,
% cd ../prcs.big
% romeo -xli ../pilot.rom
I'll leave it to the reader to decipher "-xli."
% rm Expense* Calculator*
% cd ..
Suppose also that you'd like to never be without your favorite document reader, GutenPalm, which you have as GutenPalm.prc. You've also decided that EasyCalc (which requires MathLib.prc) is just way better than the default Calculator, and GPLed to boot. To assemble a new ROM with these changes, type
% romeo -a 3.50 -s prcs.small/* -l prcs.big/* GutenPalm.prc Easy*.prc MathLib.prc -o custom.rom
The -a option is for assembling new ROMs and takes an optional PalmOS
version argument, which defaults to 3.50. The -s option tells Romeo
to build a small ROM including the indicated files. The -l option
adds a large ROM region to the assembled file, and includes the files listed
afterwards. The -o gives the output image file name.
% os2pdb custom.rom
If os2pdb gives you an error or warning, do not use the resulting pdb! It will break your palm. Then transfer the resulting file, custom.pdb, to your pilot
% pilot-xfer -i custom.pdb
Finally, use the OS Flash Palm utility to flash your new ROM onto your Palm. Do not ignore any warnings that osflash gives you! Ignoring the warnings will break your Palm, guaranteed. (We made this mistake, and wrote this page as a consequence). If you get a warning, send us email so we can sort out the incompatibility. When this is finished, you will definitely need to do a hard reset on your Palm, and restore all your old settings and applications.