Rex Forum

ridge · Member

The bad news is, I almost toasted my REX when updating the firmware. It hung up and never boot up. Don't be scared, it's caused by the 5% batteries but not my code bug. The good news is, the update firmware menu of Rex tools was not greyed out even it couldn't connect to the COM port. So I can update again with good batteries.
So, it's done. I wrote something to scan the firmware file and found more than 200k in the first 128 used pages(not the 19 empty pages reserved by Chris.) It's a little slower than 1.0 because it has to find the BMPs hidden in more than 100 pages, and each page contains different amount of characters. But it works, I tested it with adder, with Calender and Dock patches. Nothing failed until now.
The known end of Memo bug in 1.0 was also fixed.
Please download it from: http://www.geocities.com/ridgeren/

Happy New year and enjoy this gift.
Ridge

yiming · Member

hi Ridge

when you said in your last post that your rex was toasted, i thought that's the end of the development of cReader.

but what a pleasant surprise 24 hours later to know that you've succeeded in improving the add-in.

i've installed the add-in, and it works perfectly as promised. though not as fast as ver1.0, but definitely very much faster than ver1.0a and the speed is really acceptable. now i can use cReader and adder togther - i don't have to sacrifice my bear paw or fish! Very Happy

from the postings on this board, i guess you should know that they are many grateful users of your excellent add-in. and ver1.1 is really a great gift for the new year!

three improvement suggestions you may want to consider. 1. arrange the file listing in alpha order 2. add a scrollbar to the file listing 3. scroll bar for memo (if possible).

a big thank you to you, Ridge, you are great! Very Happy

yiming · Member

for those of you who have cMemo in your Rex, after you've successful installed cReader, you need to reinstall cMemo. this is becoz cMemo installs a firmware patch making the Rex memo category menu accessible to cMemo, and when you install cReader, the patch will be overwritten.

ridge · Member

Yes, any patch should be reinstalled after you updating the firmware, which is not only for cReader.
The cReader.rex is alreay 8k, I would have to use multiple pages for more features, like the scroll bars.
Another way is to modify cMemo. But cMemo uses the line breaks inside the DB, which could break the Chinese character. The solution might be something adding line breaks to Chinese memos before loading it into Rex.

Ridge

ridge · Member

Thanks Yiming for the testing. A conflict with cMemo was found and I rebuilt the firmware to skip this page.

HONGXING · Member

You can maybe use a compression algorithm to store more characters in ROM.

fpeforever · Member

Hi,ridge.I want to download your Ver 1.1 patch,but i could't concect to http://www.geocities.com/ridgeren/ ,can you send me a copy by email?
My email adderss is [email protected]
thanks!

ridge · Member

The speed is already slower because of switching between 100 pages. And the size also reached 8k limit. I don't think it's possible to compress the font library.

erik · Member

Actually, a 12 dots chinese character font only needs 18 bytes space. but in the firmware delivered with creader, it taked 26 bytes.
Therefore, maybe we could save 8 bytes per character through rewrite the printChinese() function.

Sunus · Member

Hi, Ridge. I want to download your cReader Ver 1.1 and source code, but I could't concect to http://www.geocities.com/ridgeren/ ,can you send me a copy by Email?
My email adderss is : [email protected]
Thank you very much!

miyihuxi · Member

Hi, Ridge.
I also could't concect to http://www.geocities.com/ridgeren/ ,can you send me a copy by Email?
My email adderss is : [email protected]
Thank you very much!

ridge · Member

The reason I am using 26 bytes to store the BMPs is, the C BMP drawing function of RexDK only supports the format includes width and height and the width has to be 8X even if it's less. And the BMP has to be in the flash Rom as static data, which means I couldn't store a 18 bytes BMP and convert to 26 at runtime before displaying(Any BMPs in RAM couldn't be used by the function). So you can find all the other BMPs used in Rex were also stored in this format. Maybe you can write an ASM function to solve this problem. But currently there are no more code space left in cReader, and the 26 bytes BMP could fit into the firmware without any problem.
If you can change that to 18 bytes, some pages would have more space left, but no one else is using the space of a used page as I did.

yiming · Member

for those who are unable to download cReader from Ridge's site, you can download it from my site rexstuff.goin.to Very Happy

Rockblue · Member

I could not visit your site here in China.

and, do you or any nice guys know if there is some kind of dictionary??

so i can learn english with this coooool stuff???

thanks with best regards,
stone

MSN: [email protected]

yiming · Member