At 5:22 PM -0500 1999/12/10, Paul A. Dugas wrote:
>I think I remember someone saying the unique serial number was only
>available on the devices with EEPROM flash memory so the older Pilots (w/o
>2MB upgrades), the Palm IIIe, and the Visor are all out.
>
>Just to make sure Palm heard me... Major bummer...
We hear you. Unfortunately, this is a reality of the manufacturing process. Not all
product fabrication facilities have the equipment necessary to insert a unique ID into
each flash chip programmed, and Palm Computing has no control over the facilities used
by its licensees, or the decision to use masked versus flash ROM. Therefore the serial
number has been specified as an optional component of the ROM image. Similarly, a
partial serial number containing the manufacturing information but no unique device
number may exist in specific products, so it's important to follow the published
devsup sample code for retrieving this information very closely:
CharPtr bufP;
Word bufLen;
Word retval;
retval = SysGetROMToken (0, sysROMTokenSnum, (BytePtr*) &bufP, &bufLen);
if ((!retval) && (bufP) && ((Byte) *bufP != 0xFF)) {
// it's valid!
WinDrawChars(bufP, bufLen, 20, 50);
}
else
// do something else; we don't have a serial number.
We're considering alternative mechanisms to uniquely identify devices, but at this
time have no definitive plans.
Regards,
Jim Schram
3Com/Palm Computing
Partner Engineering
