[Advantage X7500, MDA Ameo ROM Development] Sogarth:
This ROM is deprecated, as the purpose of the ROM was to help test a kitchen. As the kitchen has been released, this ROM will no longer be supported. Please use the kitchen to build a ROM, and report issues there.

Over the past several weeks, in my copious spare time (<-- sarcasm, if you missed it :p), I've been working on a more or less vanilla ROM (in this case, vanilla referring to one that is very similar to shipping ROMs). My goal in this case has been slightly different from some of the other ROMs which have popped up here, though: my ultimate goal is to release a suitable ROM kitchen so that users in the Athena forum here can develop ROMs that create their own custom ROMs, rather than having to rely on other people to tweak their ROMs for them.

As a result, this ROM isn't a very interesting ROM in a lot of ways. It's meant to be a test for a solid basic ROM. If this test goes without much in the way of problems (which is what I hope for), in roughly a week, I should be able to release the kitchen for this ROM. At that point, I'd like to see users contribute OEM packages and/or tweaks to make things better. I'd prefer to avoid putting them in the base ROM because not everybody is willing to make the same tradeoffs (like the GlyphCache registry hack which trades memory for display speed). I'll be using this ROM for the next week or so as well, to help flush out any issues. I've been running it for a couple of days, and it seems fine so far.

Features:

Based on the HTC Diamond Windows Mobile 6.1 (5.2.19915), with a full set of Microsoft applications (.NET Compact Framework 2.0, Office, OneNote, Remote Desktop Mobile, Transcriber, Windows Live, etc.)

Screen auto-rotation

Included/updated software:

Adobe Flash Lite 2.1.0.0R1 (HTC Diamond)

Adobe Reader 2.5.103000.60R2 (HTC Diamond)

JBlend Java VM 3.3.5.20080515.1.1 (HTC Diamond)

RealVGA 1.1 (pulled from AP4 for a version with an icon! :p)

RealVGA 128 dpi resources (freshly pulled from Windows Mobile 6.1 except for riresdll.128.dll, because I couldn't find one...)

RealVGA 96 dpi resources (freshly pulled from Windows Mobile 6.1)

VCommManager 0.3 (July 11, 2008)

HTC applications have been updated to:

HTC Album 2.0.18152532.1 (HTC Diamond)

HTC Advanced Network applet 1.0.7.0 (HTC Diamond, replaces the separate CSD Type, GPRS Authentication, HSDPA Switch, and SMS Service settings applets)

HTC Animation (HTC Diamond, only works properly in portrait mode)

HTC Audio Booster 1.0.18114021.0 (HTC X7510, so that it matches Audio Manager)

HTC Audio Manager 1.2.18133129.0 (HTC X7510)

HTC Camera 4.01.30725.02 (HTC X7510)

HTC Connection Setup 1.5.34057.2 (HTC Diamond)

HTC Enlarge Start Menu 1.2.34070.1 (HTC Diamond)

HTC Home Plugin 2.0.18112825.0 (HTC X7510)

HTC Large Title Bar 4.26.0.0 (HTC Diamond)

HTC Outlook Enhancement 1.0.3540.3 (HTC Diamond)

HTC Phone Canvas 1.50.30556.0 (HTC X7510)

HTC Picture Enhancement 1.50.18131521.c2 (HTC Diamond)

HTC Power applet (HTC Diamond, combines the Backlight and Power settings applets)

HTC QuickGPS 1.00.18141121.0 (HTC X7510)

HTC Random Access 4.0.18133030.0 (HTC Diamond, only works in 192dpi)

HTC SmartDialing 2.5.30434.0 (HTC X7510)

HTC Subdisplay 1.20.30295.0 (HTC X7510)

HTC SymbolPad 1.0.29364.0 (HTC X7510, it now eats up less space!)

HTC Task Manager 2.1.34072.100 (HTC Diamond)

HTC USBtoPC (HTC X7510, since the HTC Diamond version tries to support a popup which the Athena drivers can't support)

HTC TouchFLO 3.0.29946.34 (HTC X7510)

HTC Voice Recorder 1.10.18151728.0 (HTC Diamond)

HTC Volume Control 1.0.18151630.0 (HTC Diamond)

Drivers have been updated to the X7510 drivers (with the exception of keybddr.dll and gpsid_HTC.dll)

Backgrounds for Audio Booster, Audio Manager, QuickGPS, and the phone skin have been tweaked to work on up to 96 dpi without causing visual corruption.

Miscellaneous other updates which aren't really worth listing for this test ROM, although they'll all be listed with a kitchen release

Known issues/concerns:

The XIP is the XIP from AP 5.0 beta (build 19588.1.1.4, which was from the Sony X1 Xperia ROM). I've tried to generate a matching XIP for the ROM, but it won't boot. Anybody around here know how to create a good XIP? :D

There seem to be some issues with the Bluetooth OBEX service not being able to start. That's true of this ROM as well. It's able to send files to a PC without a problem, but it can't receive files (although it can copy them).

Even though screen rotation works both in the operating system and in HTC Album, HTC Album's screen rotation has the chance to screw up the operating system's screen rotation. A workaround is to use an application that can restart services (such as the FdcSoft Task Manager) to restart HTC Sensor Service (Athena).

Although the phone skin does work on 128 and 96 dpi, the speed dial application can act flaky and start drawing itself off-screen, which can trigger an error. One workaround is to dial a single number, then rotate the screen, which forces a redraw, after which it functions properly.

The VGA HTC Home plugin could be in slightly better shape. The TabSetting registry entry doesn't seem to work (or at least nobody's responded to me here yet), and the Profile tab shows a keyboard vibration option that, naturally, doesn't work.

The enlarged start menu has some icon overlap on 128 dpi.

The nifty System Status popup on 96 dpi seems to trigger just to the left of the connectivity indicator, while not triggering on the connectivity or signal strength indicators. It does work, just a little strangely on the other dpi settings.

Sym-A now generates the _ character instead of the $ character. (Added July 11, 2008)

Reported issues/concerns:

Some users are reporting an initialization infinite loop. The new ROM (updated July 11, 2008) might fix this; please report if it's still broken for you. (Added July 11, 2008)

During phone calls, the number keypad is active instead of the alphabetic keyboard. (Added July 11, 2008)

Miscellaneous notes:

Most users would probably call this ROM both bloated and underfeatured. Seemingly contradictory, yet true. It probably includes things that you don't care about (a lot of users couldn't care less about BubbleBreaker and Solitaire, for example), yet doesn't include things you do (like maybe a better task manager). That's not the point of this ROM. The whole point of the kitchen is so that you can take things out that you care nothing about, and put in what you do care about. I'll be doing the same myself.

This ROM has all .rgu files deleted, and only a single .dsm file. Although that's frequently done for "security" reasons (to prevent ROMs from being disassembled), in this case, it's more for performance reasons. Menneisys has done some testing which shows that more files in \Windows slows down system performance. Besides of which, if everything goes as planned, users will have access to this kitchen straight from me anyways.

Updates (July 11, 2008):

The new test ROM is now bundled with primary and secondary splash screens, as well as a blank extended ROM. This will hopefully address the initialization infinite loop; please report if it's still broken for you.

pimstore.dll has been replaced with a Windows Mobile 6.1 96 dpi version, doing the equivalent of what the SJ Contact Summary fix .cab did (I don't know where that pimstore.dll came from, whereas I know where the module I used came from). This fixes contact summaries in 96 and 128 dpi resolutions.

Permissions have been tweaked for *.htm files in the ROM generation .bat file. This fixes issues with reading/writing SMS.

VCommManager updated to version 0.3. The skin has been replaced with a significantly smaller .png.

Links (Updated July 11, 2008):

Currently for SPL 3.5 only (I haven't tested SPL 1.2, and for the final ROM, swapping out the OS.nb for an SPL 1.2 version and updating the ROM folder for the XIP should be sufficient):

Megaupload

RapidShare

CheckAutoRun test ROM (Megaupload)

Feel free to ask questions! I'll answer what I can. :)