I have the F900BT and its been upgraded to the 3.x firmware and working for months. I decided to try and add the following mods:

- software speed bypass

- larger clock on map screen

- buttons to toggle route TTS (voice)

I've got a problem with the data.zip though. If I uncompress it using the terminal and then recompres it, from the extracted directory, using:

zip -r ../data.zip *

It creates the archive fine, but when I copy it to the APL2/iGo folder and restart, then unit just hangs at the starting up message. Replacing the data.zip with the original one returns everything to normal. The layout of the archive is correct, ie it doesn't contain a top level data directory.

Has anyone done any mods with a mac that can help explain what is going on?

Yes it can be done on a Mac but you need to use Windows emulation.

If I have to use Win emulation, that's not really using a Mac. For me that's not possible, because I'm on a powerPC based mac, which can't run windows either through a VM or natively.

Has no one figured out what the difference is? I assume its a zip file format issue, but when I checked the internal zip formats, both files required version 2.0 for the decompression.

Well I guess someone could rack their brain for hours and finally figure out how to do it but if there is an easier solution most people usually will go with it.

I think you misunderstood the issue. There is no easier way, I don't have a windows machine and I have no way of running win VM.

At any rate, I figured out how to do it. Install Keka from http://www.kekaosx.com. It will create a data.zip file that will work on the head unit. I believe Keka uses the 7zip library rather than the stuff from Info-Zip, which is what comes with OSX.

I also played with python, using the zipfile.ZipFile class. I believe that would work as well, but I didn't feel like writing a python script to test things out.

I hope this helps folks.

Nice find.