Easter Eggs In Zaurus Roms?

[Varti]

Hi,

first of all, happy Easter everyone, I hope you all are having a great weekend! On a (somewhat) related matter, I wonder if there has ever been one or more easter eggs hidden in any of the Z's ROMs. After a search in the forum, I only found a reference about them in the OpenZaurus' CardFS ROMs, though no description of what they might be, has anybody seen them?

https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?s=&...ost&p=59741

Varti

[HoloVector]

Happy Belated Easter.   This is the first I have heard of Zaurus Easter Eggs.    
Now I'm going have to search through Cacko and PdaXROM for some.

[Varti]

I have done for fun a quick search for the words "secret", "easter" and "egg" in an extracted Cacko root file, and found nothing interesting as expected. If there's such a message in any file, it will be probably encoded, encrypted, or simply it doesn't contain those words.

Regarding pdaXrom, we can at least wait for an answer from InSearchOf

Varti

[Varti]

I just got a confirmation that Zaurus' kexecboot does not contain any secret part, due to lack of space on NAND.

Varti

[HoloVector]

There was an Easter Egg in pdaXii13 Full.  If you had a text file with a certain name the Zaurus would speak it to you while it was booting up.  It scared the crap out of me when Meanie included the text file in one of the earlier versions that I was testing for him.  

[Varti]

There was an Easter Egg in pdaXii13 Full.  If you had a text file with a certain name the Zaurus would speak it to you while it was booting up.  It scared the crap out of me when Meanie included the text file in one of the earlier versions that I was testing for him.  

I must try that someday  I wonder what speech synthesis program he used, Flite maybe? Do you remember what name must the file have, and where it should be stored?

Varti

[HoloVector]

As luck would have it Leafpad remembered that I opened it 10 years ago.  The filename is welcome.txt and it needs to under \home\root for it to work.

[HoloVector]

Me: There is also the useful Easter Egg that the Sharp Engineers burned in the ROM.  

Anyone Else: What the heck is he talking about now  

Me: If you wiped out your DM (Diagnostic Menu) partition during a botched U-Boot install.....  
       Just use the backup with Fn-DM.    

Anyone Else: That really isn't an Easter Egg because it is in the hardware.    

Me: Yes, but it is still software.    

Anyone Else:      

[Varti]

Thanks for finding out how to activate it, I have seen that this is not mentioned anywhere else, so it's good that we have it documented at last.

And IMHO the Fn-DM trick is technically not really an Easter egg, I guess  I wonder why they didn't choose to set the backup diagnostics menu as the default one, instead of having two of them.

Varti

[HoloVector]

There is an Easter Egg in the C860's Diag Menu.  Under the Extra Menu there is a listing that says ***DEMO***.  When you select it I get BMP format error.  Which could possibly be caused by my running Cacko not the original Sharp ROM.  Varti, do you see a ***DEMO*** item on your C860?

Both my C1000 and C3200 do not have the ***DEMO***

[Varti]

There is an Easter Egg in the C860's Diag Menu.  Under the Extra Menu there is a listing that says ***DEMO***.  When you select it I get BMP format error.  Which could possibly be caused by my running Cacko not the original Sharp ROM.  Varti, do you see a ***DEMO*** item on your C860?

Both my C1000 and C3200 do not have the ***DEMO***

I remember I already heard about that demo feature: when run, it expects a number of BMP files to be stored on an SD and/or CF card, with a specific filename pattern. It shows the images one by one in a slideshow, it was most probably used by Sharp to demo the Zauruses at various fairs. I have not been able to find the related post here, nor I have found any mention on the net... I'll check if my 860 has that menu item too.

Varti