Card Tricks on Pocket PC (PPC)

rgray1736

Card Tricks on Pocket PC (PPC)

« on: 15 / December / 2008, 21:08:03 »

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Hello All!
To the point quickly-

Does anyone know what would be involved to use a pocket PC to run card tricks? Is there some version already available?

The situation-
I travel for months with my camera (and pocket pc!), and it would be good to perform low-level formats on the memory cards. The PC can easily re-load the required CHDK software, which is great, but it's that bootable part that seems elusive. Not sure what happens to make the SD card bootable, it doesn't take but an instant (so probably not much?), but that part seems to require a regular PC (so far).
Beyond the issue of needing access to a PC (which isn't too big of a deal in itself as many public pc's are usually available in developing countries), there is the issue of being able to load software (i.e. card tricks on public computers), and virus contamination is always a concern (particularly in developing countries). Fortunately, regular viruses don't seem to bother the PPC's (very different architecture), but who wants to risk the media that photos will reside?
Love the CHDK project, I've spread the word to all users that I know!

Regards,
Rob G.
rgray1736 "at" hotmal "dot" com

One more thing, there was a discussion a while back about Chinese made S5 models accepting CHDK. Mine works fine.

« Last Edit: 15 / December / 2008, 21:11:50 by rgray1736 »

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whim

2041
A495/590/620/630 ixus70/115/220/230/300/870 S95

Re: Card Tricks on Pocket PC (PPC)

« Reply #1 on: 22 / December / 2008, 05:10:48 »

Hi Rob

It should be perfectly possible to make cards bootable on whatever computer. All that happens when you run
'bootable.exe' is that the string 'BOOTDISK' is written to sector 0 (aka MBR) of the card (at byte offset 0x24 / decimal 36)
I see 2 ways to do this :

1) find a disk / sector editor that runs on your machine and do it by hand

2) find a C compiler and compile bootable.exe for your machine - i would think that it should be possible to use
Visual Studio on a PC for this job, as both OS's are (c)Micro$oft

CardTricks itself can not be ported, it is written in AutoIt 3 (which is limited to 32/64 bits intel Windows)

wim

edit: sorry but i never played with ppc's - maybe other forum member could give you more specific info ?

edit2: if needed you can find the source code for bootable.exe in CardTricks\SRC\helper_sources.zip

edit3: googling just taught me that Pelles C supports Windows Mobile, i'll check it out (since i'm allergic to MS's Intellitype

)

« Last Edit: 22 / December / 2008, 06:36:01 by whim »

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rgray1736

Re: Card Tricks on Pocket PC (PPC)

« Reply #2 on: 05 / September / 2011, 21:11:59 »

Thanks for the great reply!
Since then, I've discovered a simple way to do low-level formatting and still getting a bootable SD card without card tricks. I wasn't aware that CHDK could be loaded via a firmware update and then selecting the 'make card bootable' option via a menu selection.
So if anyone is also dealing with this issue (at least with a Canon S5), simply follow the directions:
Have your full version CHDK saved in the internal memory on your Pocket PC (PPC).
Perform your format (or low-level format) in-camera.
Remove SD card from the camera, load in PPC slot and copy the CHDK files back on the card.
Select the Update Firmware option from the appropriate Canon menu. This loads in CHDK.
From the CHDK menus select the Make card Bootable option.
That should be all that's needed!

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waterwingz

12092

Re: Card Tricks on Pocket PC (PPC)

« Reply #3 on: 05 / September / 2011, 21:26:15 »

Quote from: rgray1736 on 05 / September / 2011, 21:11:59

Perform your format (or low-level format) in-camera.

This should work as described as long as you are using a 4G or smaller SD card and your PPC formats the card as FAT16. FAT16 is needed if you want to use the SD Card Lock boot method ( i.e. autoboot at camera startup).

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