VisorCentral.com - What is the minimum OS upgrade you want NOW for the Deluxe?

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-- What is the minimum OS upgrade you want NOW for the Deluxe? (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=12975)

Posted by MPM on 03-13-2001 10:39 PM:

Ok, now that the Visor Edge is out and it doesn't have Flash ROM to allow OS upgrades, it looks as if Handspring is simply not going to ever produce a Visor with Flash ROM. So OS upgrades are going to have to come as patches. Which of course, Handspring has also not produced (other than to fix bugs in the existing OS on the Visor).

So if Handspring truly does monitor these VisorCentral Forums, let's voice our opinion on what kind of OS upgrade patch that us Deluxe (and Standard) Visor owners want.

Posted by bradhaak on 03-13-2001 11:29 PM:

The chances of a patch to update the OS are nonexistent. I'm not sure that it would even be possible. It would mean booting to the new image instead of the one in the ROM. Additionally, it would eat between 1MB and 2MBs of memory depending on which OS is involved and which features are added.

The reason for the size and complexity is that it would not be a true patch. a patch is just replacing a few files that add functionality or fix bugs. A new version of the OS would have to replace everything in the ROM.

A new OS on a SpringBoard is also not practical for reasons that have been noted elsewhere.

People need to accept that in spite of what HandSpring implies on their website, the only OS updates that will ever be made available are bug fixes within the existing OS version, not upgrades to a new version.

Posted by tucson_sailors on 03-14-2001 03:13 PM:

Ok - no upgrade, what PATCHES do we want

Ok - lets say (for the sake of arguement) that Handspring is not going to upgrade the OS via a patch. Not surprising, as that would stop some of us from upgrading to the newer hardware.

I personally don't find a whole lot in the newer Palm OS's that I want, with the exception of the grayscale upgrade. Since the hardware can already support more gray colordepth (lets ignore the irony in that statement) why not allow us to be able to use that functionality? Also, if Handspring is not going to make this, could the development community be able to add that as a hack?

Tucson Sailors

Posted by bradhaak on 03-14-2001 07:04 PM:

There are a number of apps out there today that will do gray-scale on a Visor Deluxe. All of them are writing directly to the hardware rather than letting the OS do it. I can point programmers at a number of sites where they can download sample source code. I have even written my own (mostly out of curiosity). There are a couple of problems with this approach.

The first problem is that unless you really work at it, your code will be much slower than the built-in support. This is because most programmers are not going to take the time to really optimize their code. Ideally this should all be written in assembly language to get the best performance.

The second problem is that there is no guarantee that your home grown code is not going to break some future version of the OS (or a current version on different hardware). So chances are the programmer is going to have to put multiple versions of the graphics engine into the program to support both old and new devices.

Chances are that this is more trouble than most casual programmers are going to want to deal with.

The idea of putting it all into a hack seems interesting. The problem here is that the sheer amount of the OS that you would have to replace is scary. I don't see how you could practically do this without replacing the entire OS since you are going to have to revector HUGE chunks of it in your hack anyway.

A possible third solution would be to combine these two ideas. If someone would write a full-featured, high performance shared library (like mathlib) for graphics and make it freely/widely available, developers could access it easily and produce good gray-scale programs for the older OSs. Ideally, the shared library would also contain direct OS graphics support. This would encourage programmers to use it since they would not have to write two pieces of code. I don't have time to do this on my own, but I might participate if there were enough other programmers interested.

Posted by MPM on 03-14-2001 09:38 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by bradhaak
The chances of a patch to update the OS are nonexistent. I'm not sure that it would even be possible. It would mean booting to the new image instead of the one in the ROM. Additionally, it would eat between 1MB and 2MBs of memory depending on which OS is involved and which features are added.

The reason for the size and complexity is that it would not be a true patch. a patch is just replacing a few files that add functionality or fix bugs. A new version of the OS would have to replace everything in the ROM.

I think you are way off on these points.

First I checked out was is in the ROM of the Visor Deluxe (Palm OS 3.1). I came up with 772K of applications and 770K of libraries, prefrence panels, and the OS. Now I don't want to upgrade all my applications, so at the worst case a patch would have to replace at most 770K of code. But even this is unreasonably high if all we want is 16 level grayscale support. Huge chunks of the 770K are libraries and pref panels that have nothing to do with graphics. The main part of the OS seems to be in a 408K database called "System". My guess is that all the "core" of the OS is in this database. So now we have a 408K patch at worst. Simply patching the graphics calls will likely be even smaller than 408K. Throw in the rest of the OS 3.3 new features (but don't upgrade the applications!) and the patch would still be reasonable in size.

Look, many of us that want an OS upgrade patch just want the 16-level grayscale support. The tired old excuse of "well you new it did not support 16-level grays" is bogus. I did NOT know this. I specifically checked on this feature before I bought a Visor Deluxe. Problem was that most reviews did not state this feature one way or the other, but if they did, then the review stated the capabilities of the hardware NOT the OS!

So I bought my Visor Deluxe thinking that I had 16-level grayscale support. I also knew full well that the OS was not upgradable, but I didn't care - it had 16-level gray support already! Wrong! It was about a month later that this topic came up on the Visor Central Forums and the fact that OS 3.1 does not support 16-level grays, but the hardware does, finally came out "into the light". Most newbies are still confused over why FireView can display 16-level grays but AvantGo cannot.

Once I found this out I felt betrayed by Handspring, but I then remembered the "OS can be upgraded via the SpingBoard slot or via software patches" on the Handspring FAQ. So I thought that Handspring would upgrade the Deluxe with at least OS 3.3 when OS 3.5.2 was in full deployment in all the Palm units and the new Visor units.

But nope. Nothing. Nada.

This why I hope that Handspring will wakeup and realize their mistake and get us a patch to upgrade the OS on the Visor Deluxe.

Posted by bradhaak on 03-14-2001 10:11 PM:

I see your point, but I think that you still need to replace the whole OS. Ignoring for the moment your analysis of the size requirements which I don't totally agree with, you still have a major problem.

Most programs will check for feature availability by OS version. In other words, if the OS is version 3.1, you are not going to look for graphics capabilities. If the patch provides a newer version number, say v3.5, so that apps will expect the graphics support to be there, apps will also expect every other feature of 3.5 to be there. including application capabilities, launch codes, new APIs, and changed APIs. Here is a partial list of graphics and windowing capabilities that were added to the 3.5 OS.

WinCreateBitmapWindow, WinDrawPixel, WinErasePixel, WinGetBitmap, WinGetPatternType, WinGetPixel, WinIndexToRGB, WinInvertPixel, WinPaintBitmap, WinPaintChar, WinPaintChars, WinPaintLine, WinPaintLines, WinPaintPixel, WinPaintPixels, WinPaintRectangle, WinPaintRectangleFrame, WinPalette, WinPopDrawState, WinPushDrawState, WinRGBToIndex, WinScreenLock, WinScreenMode, WinScreenUnlock, WinSetBackColor, WinSetDrawMode, WinSetForeColor, WinSetPatternType, WinSetTextColor, BmpBitsSize, BmpColortableSize, BmpCompress, BmpCreate, BmpDelete, BmpGetBits, BmpGetColortable, BmpSize, ColorTableEntries

This is just a partial list that just concerns graphics and doesn't include 3.2 or 3.3 additions.

All told, there are approximately 200 functions that have been added since 3.1 and at least 20 that have been removed. Additionally a number of existing functions have been renamed or extended.

Just hacking in some of the graphics functions might work for a small percentage of apps, but trying to make it look like a newer OS without full functionality would probably break more apps than it would fix.

I still don't believe that you make this work without replacing the entire OS. That is why I made the alternate proposal to develop a true OS independent graphics library.

MPM - Hope this clarifies why I feel the way that I do (even if I still haven't convinced you).

Posted by ss@rr on 03-18-2001 02:19 PM:

back on track

I want the multi-tasking/threading OS that's in the queue (saw it mentioned in a thread here somewhere; about 1.5 years out).

__________________
Steve
"Gort, Klatu verada nictu."

Posted by Seraphim on 03-20-2001 02:53 AM:

Re: back on track

quote:
Originally posted by ss@rr
I want the multi-tasking/threading OS that's in the queue (saw it mentioned in a thread here somewhere; about 1.5 years out).

You are looking at the wrong hardware. Take at look at "yopy"(www.yopy.com) and "vr3" (www.agendacomputing.com). Both are running on Linux. I ordered my vr3 a week ago. Comming in sometime soon.

Seraphim

Posted by ss@rr on 03-22-2001 02:13 PM:

BTW, it should be running on an aluminum case (choice of colors!), minimum 320x320 64k color screen, min. 32 mhz, min. 16mb RAM, OS in flash, current VDX size is ok (no bigger please!), SB slot, IRDA, USB, etc?

__________________
Steve
"Gort, Klatu verada nictu."

Posted by Packrat on 03-23-2001 11:44 PM:

Seraphim, are you actually a developer, or did you just sign up for the developer program to get the device early? Are they actually shipping the VR3?

I'm asking cuz I just bought a Visor Deluxe for $150 (after rebate) but the VR3 looks way better, ESPECIALLY since I wanted to use the VD as a universal remote and the VR3 seems to have this built in? It mentioned an IR port (not IrDA)

whoop! it sounds great!

__________________
Packrat
[email protected]

Posted by Zidane on 03-24-2001 12:15 AM:

What hacks are available to make the Deluxe use the 16-bit grayscale? I've tried searching PalmGear and can't seem to find anything.

Also, if someone can point me to a website that gives a listing of the APIs added and removed in OS3.5 I'd appreciate it.

I'd like to see if I can't come up with a workaround to the OS3.5 patch.

Posted by bradhaak on 03-24-2001 05:56 AM:

What you want to look at is the Palm OS Reference that is available on the PalmOS website. It is available as a PDF document. Look at the section titled Compatibility Guide. You will see a listing of all of the functions that have been added to the OS since 3.1 (more than 200). You will also see functions that have been changed. The only thing that will not show up are functions that still work the same but are required to interact with new or changed functions. Additionally there are a number of functions that have been removed, but you shouldn't have to deal with them very much.

Good luck

Posted by on 04-03-2001 12:12 AM:

I don't know if this will help anybody but try this download.

http://www.twinkletwinkle.com/download/graytoggle.zip

It will toggle your visor thru any color config available. The visor dlx has 2 choices, B&W and grayscale(4 grayscale).

I haven't found anything that would let you go any higher then that on a visor dlx but this allows you to see the grayscale icons in the launcher.

What I did was use silverscreen to change the grayscale icons for most of my apps. Then deleted silverscreen and use the standard OS and turned the color setting to 4 color grayscale. Now I have the benefit of using better looking icons without the overhead of silverscreen.

Posted by ss@rr on 04-03-2001 03:30 AM:

quote:
Originally posted by Zidane
What hacks are available to make the Deluxe use the 16-bit grayscale? I've tried searching PalmGear and can't seem to find anything.

Properly speaking, only apps that write directly to the screen will make use of the grayscale capability of the screen; or so it's been posted 'round here. However...

Screen Prefs 1.03
http://staging.palmgear.com/softwar...amp;prodID=7547

ColourDepth 1.0
http://staging.palmgear.com/softwar...mp;prodID=13561

Depth DA (under Utilities)
http://member.nifty.ne.jp/yamakado/da/

other can be found searching for "depth" at PalmGear (eg- LaunchEm and MagicText plugins)

__________________
Steve
"Gort, Klatu verada nictu."

Posted by bradhaak on 04-03-2001 05:43 AM:

quote:
ss@rr suggested looking at:
Screen Prefs 1.03
http://staging.palmgear.com/softwar...mp;prodID=7547

ColourDepth 1.0
p://staging.palmgear.com/softwar...29&prodID=13561

Depth DA (under Utilities)
//member.nifty.ne.jp/yamakado/da/

These are pretty cool. The only one that I had seen before was Screen Prefs. All three of them let you select between 2 and 4 gray scale modes. However, none of them let you use anything higher - no 16 grayscale modes.

Posted by ss@rr on 04-03-2001 02:33 PM:

If you have MagicText, they have a plugin for screen depth that allows 16 grays; except on my VDX it reports the device is not capable of that and won't allow the selection.

__________________
Steve
"Gort, Klatu verada nictu."

Posted by ianb on 05-01-2001 07:52 PM:

I've become unhappy with my Deluxe because it is about time Handspring included flash RAM so the OS can be upgraded. Their cost and compatibility claims don't fly with me. In all likelihood my next handheld will be made by Palm because I do not want to be saddled with a fixed OS for the life of the device. Personally I think they're doing this on purpose to encourage purchasing of their newer products.

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