Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Kuala Lumpur
Posts: 247

Hey! I noticed something funny today.

You see, my friend, who owns a Palm Vx, just upgraded his AvantGo from Version 3.1 to 3.3 and so have I.

The funny thing is that his Palm Vx now shows AvantGo channels in full 16-level greyscale while I'm still stuck with crappy old 4-level greyscale images on my Visor Deluxe. This may not sound important but believe me it is - now all images on his Vx looks as it should instead of the horrible pointillistic look that is on mine. Example: his little nudie pics from the "A Joke A Day" channel now looks like real humans rather than chicken poxed ones.

I have just e-mailed AvantGo so I haven't received a reply yet. My question is has anyone out there managed to solve this problem? My suspicion is that AvantGo recognises PalmOS 3.5 installed on his machine and configured itself to display 16-level greyscale images while OS3.1h on the Visor is recogised as the "old" OS (which could be on anything from a PalmPilot to a Visor)and thus defaulted to a lower greyscale just so that it could satisfy older, lesser greyscale Palms.

Anybody? Anybody?


[This message has been edited by Tan Kit Hoong (edited 05-09-2000).]

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Connecticut USA
Posts: 2682

Interesting... I upgraded AvantGo on my Visor to 3.3 this weekend. If you asked me, the images are BETTER in the new version.

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MarkEagle - Ice is nice!

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Kuala Lumpur
Posts: 247

So Mark, are you saying that you now definitely have 16-Level Gresyscale pictures on your Visor? Mebbe there's something wrong with my settings.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Connecticut USA
Posts: 2682

To be honest, I don't know...

I can say that the images in 3.3 are much more detailed than they were in the previous version so I'm assuming there was some kind of resolution enhancment. I don't see where this is configurable from within AvantGo. I'm thinking now that 3.1 was simple B&W and 3.3 is grayscale???

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MarkEagle - Ice is nice!

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Baltimore MD, USA
Posts: 717

I checked in version 3.1, upgraded to 3.3, then downloaded again.

Alas, the ladies in "A Joke A Day" show no change in appearance. They still have terminal chicken pox.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Kuala Lumpur
Posts: 247

That's really weird. That means that for some reason (maybe as I suspected in my first post)AvantGo does not update our Visors to display 16-level greyscale images.

Oh and Mark, the difference is pretty startling, especially if you look at images like the ones on Joke of the Day. Previously, the babes in the page were almost impossible to make out in 4-level greyscale (and it is greyscale) but now they are appear like a good B+W pic - like the pics you get in, say, AlbumToGo

Will update you when and if I get an answer from AvantGo.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Kuala Lumpur
Posts: 247

Just got an answer from AvantGo support:

"Dear Tan,

Thanks for using AvantGo!

What OS are you running on the Visor? Palm Vx might have the 3.5 OS while your Visor is running a different version. Is your Visor capable of supporting 4bit greyscale? Check this out as it might be the cause of your problem. If running less than the 3.3 OS go to palm.com to upgrade.

Best regards,
AvantGo Support"

Geez. These guys don't seem to have even heard of the Handspring Visor.

For one thing, if they even knew anything at all about the Handspring Visor, they would know that the Visor's OS3.1H cannot be upgraded to OS3.3 or later and certainly not from Palm (we'd lose all USB support!)

For another, they don't seem to know that the Visor, like all PalmOS devices since a couple of OS upgrades ago, support 4-bit, 16-level greyscale.

However, from the answer I got from AvantGo, it looks like I was right - for some strange reason, AvantGo 3.3 will recognise any OS older than PalmOS 3.3 as being unable to support 16-level greyscale.

Help! can somebody in VisorCentral make enough noise so that AvantGo will rectify this so we can all have nicer pictures on our hands?

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Kuala Lumpur
Posts: 247

A couple of days ago, I sent an email in reply to AvantGo support's previous answer. Here's what I said:

"Dear Sir,
My Visor runs on PalmOS3.1H and cannot be upgraded (there is no FlashROM on the Visor). However, I am positive that it supports 4-bit, 16-level greyscale. If you even knew about the devices that you have created AvantGo for, you would know this.
Tan Kit Hoong
Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd"

And a few days later, I got this reply:
"Tan,

As we are not the developers of the Palm OS on the Visor, we cannot tell you what devices support 4-bit greyscale. We develop AvantGo for use on the Palm OS and Windows CE platforms and not specific devices. I do know that our applications do support this and our software should support it as long as your devices' OS does. You might want to check with Handspring to see what they support. My Handspring has 3.0H OS and looks the sames as my Palm IIIe.

AvantGo Support"

Okay, they've made another mistake here: the Visor runs on PalmOS v3.1, not 3.0...3.0 refers to the bundled apps and has nothing to do with the OS version. However, AvantGo support does correctly state that the Palm IIIe has the same OS, although not EXACTLY the same OS, as Visor users all know.



[This message has been edited by Tan Kit Hoong (edited 05-13-2000).]

Registered: May 2000
Location: Grand Rapids, MI, USA
Posts: 6

Any update on this? I'm running AvantGo 3.3.383 on both a Visor (Dx) and a Palm Vx. There is no comparison -- the Vx's 4-bit images are *far superior* to the Visor's 2-bit images.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Kuala Lumpur
Posts: 247

Nope no word from AvantGo at all. Oh well, looks like we will be stuck with 2-bit greyscale until the folks at AvantGo decide to do something about it....

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Posts: 109

I ran into a problem with anther 16-shade app that didn't work on the Visor. I had to settle forthe 4-shade/2-bit images.

Seems the docs say the 16-shade only works on PalmOS 3.3 and higher. is it possible that some FAQ somewhere states that you should only use 16-shades if you detect OS 3.3 or higher? Shouldn't that be remedied to include 3.1h?

Maybe someone should develop a hack that will "lie" to certain programs about the OS version. Kind of like some of those overclocking programsd where you can specify it per-program.

Or does the Visor's OS handle 16-shades differently than PalmOS 3.3? My understanding is that you need the hardware of the EZ to do it, but is their an OS API call that maybe HandSpring deviated on?

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--
Trinition ([email protected])

Registered: Feb 2000
Location: SW Virginia
Posts: 290

quote:

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Originally posted by Trinition:
My understanding is that you need the hardware of the EZ to do it, but is their an OS API call that maybe HandSpring deviated on?

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Registered: Feb 2000
Location: SW Virginia
Posts: 290

Last night I started to try to write a simple Palm program to test my theory above. While working on it I stumbled on to the following in the Palm OS SDK Companion:

quote:

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Drawing on the Palm OS Device

The first Palm Computing platform devices have an LCD screen of 160x160 pixels. The built-in LCD controller maps a portion of system memory to the LCD. This controller can support 2 bits/pixel grayscale; however, the Palm OS software only supported 1 bit/pixel monochrome graphics until version 3.0. Two bits/pixel support was added in Palm OS 3.0 and 4 bits/pixel in Palm OS 3.3. Palm OS 3.5 introduces support for both grayscale and color displays, with system palettes of either 1, 2, 4, or 8 bits/pixel. (See "Color and Grayscale Support" for more information.) Hardware may still limit the actual displayable depths.

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Registered: Feb 2000
Location: SW Virginia
Posts: 290

Opps, I double posted. Since it won't let me delete my own messages. I just deleted the text to not clutter up things.

[This message has been edited by potter (edited 06-02-2000).]

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Posts: 109

This is a damn shame. Can't Handspring release a patch? I'd like to use the 16 shades available to me. Programmers will only ever use the OS to do it (unless they really want high performance or love HandSpring).

HP offeres refunds when the customers complain about color depth. What does HandSpring do?

Registered: May 2000
Location: Grand Rapids, MI, USA
Posts: 6

Here's the response I got back from AvantGo (validating previous posts):

"The hardware in the Visor can do 4bpp, but the OS does not have the graphics
code to draw at this depth. This is why you expereince (sic) the diffrence (sic). There is
nothing AvantGo can do about this until Handpsring changes their OS to a newer
version."

*Sigh* I suppose I'll drop a line to Handspring's tech support, for what it's worth.

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 219

MaybeGrayControl and DefaultGray (Click "software" button on the bottom of the page) help with displaying in grayscale, but I'm not sure. I can't use AvantGo 3.3 since I use ePocrates so I haven't tried. DefaultGray is not compatible with AlbumToGo(it shows pictures fine but when you close a picuture the screen shows enlarged photo titles).



[This message has been edited by Taki (edited 06-02-2000).]

Registered: May 2000
Location: Grand Rapids, MI, USA
Posts: 6

I've given those programs a spin, but no dice. AvantGo needs 3.3 ...

Handspring's response? "The Visor's OS can not be upgraded, since it is stored in the ROM (Read Only Memory). As for patches, we do not have any such patch available at this time, however you might find some 3rd party software that might make it possible to use the 4-bit grayscale."

I wasn't expecting much more of an answer

Registered: Apr 2000
Location: Tijuana, Mexico
Posts: 28

What about a program/hack that does what the old MS-DOS/Windows program setver did? It will report a different version of the O/S to a certain program (or programs) it used to be that some sloppy coders would compare the O/S version to a certain one (such as MSDOS 5.0) and would not allow you to run on anything lower or higher even though it would run OK in higher versions of the O/S.. so you set up setver to report to that particular program that you where running o/s 5.0...
This MAY solve the problem if someone can write a hack for it... the only potential problem that I see is if it depends on other things from the O/S that 3.1h does not have... but since it seems to work OK in a Visor I doubt that is the case..



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Leo

Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Posts: 18

Well, I'm positive that the visor can handle 4-bit grayscale. One of my favorite games, "mulg", runs in this mode. I also recall a demo of an image viewer program that included 2-bit and 4-bit versions of the same images, and there was a HUGE difference in quality of the 4-bit compared to the 2-bit. So someone is smoking something.