jonofmac

wow... I ordered this July 6th with the fastest shipping and everything and it still isnt shipped for me... Awaiting shipment.

Ok, that Z series looks like an improvement, the thing I'm really noticing is how when you were scrolling along the map it doesn't lag like hell. Even the lower end models seem to scroll at a reasonable speed, maybe 3-4 fps, whereas my F90BT is like watching a slide show when i try to scroll. Hopefully 3.0 will fix that.

The thing with 3.0 I'm scared about is, won't we lose our ability to hack the unit? That means we'll get locked at about 10 mph again! I must say I also really enjoy customizing the buttons... I guess we'll have to wait and see

Do you have an external amplifier? Or are your speakers plugged into the head unit?

I use photoshop on a PC, it shouldn't make a difference what platform you use as long as you save it correctly. If memory serves correctly, save as a 24-bit BMP, not a 32. I saved some of mine as a 32 and they would not load.

Just a heads up

At least i'm pretty sure it's 24 bit...

Yup, just verfied. Save it as a bmp, 72 dpi at 24 bits. You should be good to go after that.

Gah, I think I might have to say this won't work...

I tried my the files with virtually no compression. Boot up was rediculous (well kind of). It "flashed" the main menu after about 10 seconds, but it then would show the splash screen after that and then hang. After replacing some of the smaller files with the originals, i was able to find out that the unit was not reading the files for some reason (all of the images were just boxes).

So I came back inside to try recompressing them with the lighest compression possible, which resulted in file sizes the same as the originals, just a few hundred KB bigger, which wouldn't result in any sort of gains, or at least anythign noticable. The compression went from the original 5% to 6%.

Maybe someone else might have more luck, but I doubt it.

I noticed that there is a 7z.dll in the apl folder which I guess tells the program how to decompress the files. Any chance we could replace it with a different compression and maybe have some luck?

I wonder if the unit can open regular zip files... those have poor compression ratios

Hey guys,

I've been reading on these forums for a little while now and decided I'd join in and say hi. Thanks for the great wealth of information on this site, you have no idea how much help it's been!

So I was reading on a forum post that one of the reasons start up is slow is due to the fact that the unit has to decompress the 7Zip files. Out of curiosity, I have a backup of entire flash disk, and I went and looked at the 7zip files containing images and found that the compression ratio is very high (5% of original size on the file I checked). Who thinks that we could see boot speed increase if we were to lower the compression ratio? Conceptually it seems simple. If we take more of a load off of the CPU with decompressing, we should be able to load this faster?

Does anyone know how it is that the software works? Does it decompress these files into RAM? or does it read from the 7z every instance a file is called upon? (I would think RAM, but to my understanding, the unit doesn't have a huge amount of it)

So I'm going to try this out today and see how my F90BT reacts. I've recompressed the archives to "store" compression (no compression at all, essentially a folder with an extension ) and I'll copy it in and see how it feels.

If you guys are worrying about space (because size is up to 20 mb from the original 1 mb), I just deleted all the maps and POI locations to places that I will never drive. Since I'm in Houston, Texas, I'll never be driving my car up to New york or Canada.

I'll post back with findings

I also have the F90BT and have started modding it. For some reason in 2.0, I can't get any changes I make to WinCE to stay, I don't get it. It's not that I drag the memory bar too far to a certain side because I disable the error reporting and once I boot back into WinCE, ram was reset as well as the error reporting is turned back on. Is there some special thing I have to do? I press the OK button instead of the X, but i'm stumped by this!