broly

hi guys,

in the process of chowing down on the previous posts regarding this unit. hoping someone is feeling nice and can PM me a link to the latest version of the HDD navi files (if you only want to provide one, Northwest/Mountains please!)

canada/alaska will be much harder to find (the PC Card that came with the unit wasn't factory-- seems someone in canada sold it to an american [the odometer was in KM]).

i also note that the VIN i pulled this from says it is a "canada/navigation" car (the number '5' for 1999 cars) but the following number was a '0' (not an '8' for typical canadian cars), wonder if this had something to do with the person somehow getting navigation & rarity of this option resulting an american vin!
- car had DRL as well. so there is no doubt in my mind it was a canadian car.

wish i had the god damn original hard drive. i bet alpine is all over this ever since i opened my big goddamn mouth a month ago
-the post that shared this nugget of wisdom (that early 1999 canadian TL/CLs had maps that were discontinued shortly after) is also gone.

since the 04-08s use a similar board from what i've read (SH4 hitachi unlike the 00-03 DVD units), i wouldn't be surprised if you could flash the newer OS from the 04-08s onto the 1999 HDD.

next step after i find some newer maps (and modify the locale settings in the DBI file to see if some remnants of canada [it wouldn't be a complete map] show up) is see if i can dump the OS that's loaded in ROM. may not even finish that since i have to figure out how to dump the data from the actual unit.

will post more about my adventure after i get my brake light sensor switch installed & reset my SRS.

cheers eh

01tl4tl

Spend the 100 dollars on a decent portable GPS, any of them far exceed the abilities of the stock Acura unit, especially from a 99

Do smart phones in Canada get GPS? or is that a data usage issue thats non-existent on GPS units?

broly

actually the navigatino works extremely well from what i've seen so far (using the gps coordinates and mapping them via google earth to where i was at that time), but that's another discussion.

re: dbi file. when the unit is locking its GPS signal, it most definitely uses this file for configuration.

i first tried to change 3 entries in the file:
TARGET_COUNTRY=CA (was US)
\XL\CA_FRE.BIN CRI (both were US_***.bin)
\XL\CA_RAM.BIN VER CRI

which resulted in the unit not locking in the signal (grey screen that says it takes up to ten minutes on first boot).
however, when i changed only target country it worked just fine but the elevation was incorrect (i suspect it could have been remnants from the attempt mentioned above, as i did not unplug the battery between attempts and it had received the time but nothing else)
trying now with just the target country changed.

cheers.

broly

update: target_country=CA without touching the US_FRE US_RAM files works extremely well.

so the unit is reporting (to the server at least) that the target country is canada, and then uses the US_FRE US_RAM files.

here is the DBI file for the maps that i have:
as you can see there are some files not included with any map update (US_FRE.bin US_RAM.bin STRT_FRE.txt STRT_RAM.txt SIZE_FRE.txt SIZE_RAM.txt).
it seems the STRT (i.e. "START") files are the ones that are used for initial startup (after battery unplug), setting the ram and FRE (dunno what that means yet).
the SIZE files presumably contain information about the aforementioned properties.
and the US_FRE US_RAM seem to be the preloaded OS files or something (maybe there is no CA as the coordinates work well, just no map).

i wonder if the naming scheme is slightly different for the canada OS (if it exists. it probably doesn't and uses the US version as that should be fine).
it seems that upon bootup the GPS radio uses the (small, maybe a few megs) BIN files to talk to the server.

interesting that CA_FRE CA_RAM resulted in the process stalling. wonder if the unit was requesting files and the server didn't have them. the 1999s must have used the US configuration with the target_country as canada, with the appropriate maps.

on that note, i'm quite certain that the 42 files or whatever (referenced by JeffinNY and others) for each region are the raw map files. that is, later versions (such as the TSX and gen3 TL) probably pack all these files into a BIN.

i saw the post by bysin and noticed that he'd decrypt a bin file into a bunch of executables and stuff--i don't think that's necessary here. rather, the hard drive unit seems to have all the stuff preloaded into the OS and simply asks for maps using a prefix in the DBI file.

also, here is the CONFIG_DEF file.
these sure seem like C macros.
is there a compiler and other "dev" tools sitting in the RAM?! this seems possible because these configurations are telling the unit the file prefix and feeding it C macros.

need to look into the XL/IL setup as there is a TARGET_MODEL=XL-IL line, where