Trying to improve x49gp

[Claudio L.]

(08-31-2018 08:15 AM)3298 Wrote:  I thought of two more things I could improve in the context of flash creation.

Code:

When loading a firmware during flash initialization, check for the KINPOUPDATEIMAGE signature, and fail if it's missing

Code:

When selecting a firmware interactively, show errors in a message window and retry
The user may not even have a terminal open to catch the error message, so the previous behavior was basically a silent failure to them.

Makes sense, doesn't it?

You are on a roll!
I thought of another cool thing you can do to this emulator:
hp39gs and hp40gs emulation!
They have more or less the same hardware, I think the key areas are:
* Flash and RAM size: I believe the firmware doesn't detect size of flash or ram, it's hardcoded so it should work without modifications.
* Bootloader: I don't know if there's a bootloader binary for these machines somewhere. The KINPOUPDATEIMAGE signature is different, so it needs the different bootloader to accept the firmware (although we could modify the signature when we load the firmware, I think the 50g bootloader should flash it without any problems).
Screen: The screen of course is a few pixels smaller (64 vs 80), so that will require tweaking the emulation code a little.
SD card emulation: Can be left enabled, it won't do any harm I think (so nochanges needed to x49gp).
Keyboard: We need a new PNG and remapping of all the key functions labels, this is the most tedious work I think. But the keyboard emulation per se doesn't need to be changed at all.