QuoteHowever, it seems that the new firmware have made it even worse: When the calculator RAM is saturated, it now ends up corrupting various files stored in your flash memory. Not only this can result into data loss, but it seems like this is not limited to programs and applications, but possibly the OS, boot code and NAND as well.
So here is the thing - nobody can say what happened here at this point . No other units of the many units that have been tested on my end using critor's same files and process have show similar behavior or failures. No other person has reported a corruption or failure with a boot loader in a similar way. The only slightly similar item has been a unit that had the firmware update stop during mid-running and they had to redo the update again. To my knowledge, nobody else has seen this happen like critor reported.
Does this read to you like the sky is falling? <--person running around with the sky falling
Something happened - true. Until I get the unit back and someone can pull the flash chip though, there is absolutely no way to know what is going on here. The only report and demonstration of this failure is a single individual with a single unit - that later appears to have died in a mysterious way. Is it an isolated incident? I don't know. Nobody can know anything apart from speculating at the moment unfortunately.
Working with modern electronics is difficult for many reasons, and one of the most annoying things is my experience is that there *is* an acceptable rate of failure with modern components. You in fact pay higher money for items that have been more thoroughly validated, tested, and so on. That is what the whole CPU processor binning is about. Certain processors that have been tested as being able to run higher get sold for more cost. Others get traces clipped and sold for cheaper. Nothing can be absolutely perfect and things can potentially happen to components later.
Did the update do something to his unit? Definitely possible, but I feel it is unlikely. The boot loader resides in a protected area of flash. Writing to it isn't possible without first sending a very specific sequence of commands to unlock those blocks. Could that happen due to corrupted memory? Possible. However, it is just as likely that some blocks in his flash chip has some bad sectors that have functioned ok up until now, but just now failed when the most strenuous activity flash chips can possibly have (writing data) was busy ongoing.
Note I am not trying to blame him, or diminish the possibility of a problem here. Rather, I am just explaining another possibility.
QuoteUnfortunately, HP workers who are active posting on TI-Planet and HP Museum initially tried to shift the entire blame on TI-Planet's PDF to picture converter, even though it was not used before Critor's calculator died for good.
I'm sorry you seem to feel this way. My intent with the discussion of the picture converter was not to shift blame nor trivialize anything, but to point out that the way it has been implemented is extremely memory inefficient (due to the use of the ICON keyword which was intended for permanent "stay in ram continually" items) and that has exacerbated the memory problems in the past. People then complain that the memory is "leaking" which is just not true. The program asks to keep the bitmap loaded permanently and so the software complied.
In many ways this is like using bitmaps for a complete webpage. True, it works - however, users on mobile/dialup won't be happy that instead of a 500kb page you managed to make one that takes 20MB.
QuoteAlso, Tim Wessman announced that the ICON format will be discontinued in the next firmware update or the one after, so we recommend HP game programmers to either switch back to DIMGROB or to applications as soon as possible.
I believe that I said I *anticipate* it may happen. The reason is rather simple - ICON and the text to loading for DIMGROB are very non-portable. They are tied very specifically to one color encoding on a single platform. Maybe you haven't noticed that the HP Prime is now available on many more platforms, and that will potentially grow to more over time. In order to ensure that you can share programs and files directly everywhere, you have to take into account many different factors. Colors on the rgb 565 format have proven problematic elsewhere and it is probably time to change that to eliminate another source of potential problems.
It might be possible to do some tricks to convert the programs on the fly, but I honestly don't know at this point.
You now have support for extremely portable graphic objects - jpg and png - directly. They are about as standard as you can possibly get and are very easy to work with. Granted, we only support files packaged in apps at this point in time and that is a valid complaint (as is the lack of documentation about more complicated app creation).We hope to be able to extend that support into plain program files at some point, but that has some challenges of its own.
QuoteSo let's see how the saga continues.
Really? Saga?
Quoteif I edit the content of an application inside the connectivity kit such as the code, saving will crash the emulator. Also many app transfers will fail until after about 3 tries. Not to mention it takes about 3 reboots before custom apps can run properly (a spreadsheet will appear otherwise)
The issue here is that we just are not getting this feedback. The overall feedback we hear matches what alexgt is reporting (works pretty well) and so therefore we have nothing to test that *isn't* working well to try and fix. Please communicate examples, example programs/apps, and/or steps (calchelp at hp.com will go to me) directly to get some attention at looking at a problem.
Frankly, I and others try our best but we can't perfectly catch every discussion or comment on the internet. I have a hard time reading this site for example due to the format it uses... something about it just makes it hard for me to find stuff. Maybe I'm just too old.
QuoteI, luckily have not upgraded yet but I hope they release a new update that allows alpha overlays...
What is it you are wanting when you say "alpha overlays". PNG files do support transparency for sprites directly. We don't have alpha blending for aliases edged or anything - true. That is pretty much impossible unless we move away from the rgb565.... hmm, maybe another reason???