Trying to improve x49gp

[Claudio L.]

I had a little trouble with patch 28 not wanting to work but I finally fixed it manually and got it all working. I have not been able to test the debugging part, mainly because the only way to test for me is with newRPL, and haven't figured out how to flash it with this version of x49gp.
For the first time I removed my old x49gp version and moved on to this one, and noticed that:
a) Keyboard emulation is somehow not letting me use the + and - press while doing reset from the menu to recall the boot loader. Also it's very hard to do On-A-C or On-A-F. Anyway, I figured the only way to access the bootloader was to delete ~/.x49gp/flash. Perhaps there should be an option in the menu to do a reset while simulating + and - for 1 second or so?
b) Because of a) the only way to update firmware (after you install newRPL) is to mount a directory as an SD card, with a proper update.scp file and firmware, while at the same time deleting the flash image. This worked a couple of times and failed horribly about 80% of the times. Got an error message about invalid file name with some chinese symbols all the time, so it might be an ASCII vs. UTF8 problem.
c) The text in the menu comes up green when using grayscale mode. It's correctly black when using B&W mode. I think we need to save/restore the state of the gdk context while doing a screen update.

On second thought, we could also have an option in the menu to "manufacture" a flash image from a firmware file without using the bootloader. This functionality was in the original Makefile, it would copy the boot loader, patch the serial number and write a firmware image into the flash file. Much of this is already done when the flash file is deleted and recreated, all that's needed is to ask the user to select a firmware file. Ideally, a command line option to do this would be handy too, so the IDE can load custom firmware when starting the debugger.