Hi Carl,
>PRC2OVL tool duplicates a 33K swath through my application, building a dandy
>copy of the american english (my lingua franca :-) resources into an overlay
>file.
>
>But then what?
>
>How to edit the overlay for the target language? MPW Derez/Rez is baffled.
>Constructor in CodeWarrior is clueless.... Since I'm facing several
>translations, I'd rather avoid using an application on the palm device
>itself to do the edits, that's what I have the IDE's for!!
I thought the 4.0 SDK was going to include a version of Constructor
that edits overlay PRCs directly - but I could be out of date with
the latest plans.
>Since the overlay contains the CRC of the base resource it is an overlay
>for, it would seem that converting the resources in place and then
>extracting, say, the spanish version resources, would give you an overlay
>for the spanish version, not a spanish overlay for the english baseline.
Correct. Though you could do some ugly hacking to convert the Spanish
overlay for a Spanish base back into a Spanish overlay for English,
by using a Palm-based resource editor to replace the Spanish
overlay's ovly resource with the one found in an overlay created from
the original English app.
>Or, are we supposed to edit the CRC of the spanish overlay to match the CRC
>of the baseline application after the fact?
No.
>In addition, using Palm's 3.5 applications as a (blind?) guide, the base prc
>does not have ANY of the resources provided in the english overlay, i.e. the
>built-in and other applications on the Palm 3.5 platform are of two parts:
>1) code and other non-translated resources, 2) translated resources. This is
>a good thing since it avoids the 'bloat' of carrying around the underlying
>native resources AND the target language overlay. Good, but how do they do
>that?!
PRCs without any UI resources are informally known as "stripped" base
PRCs. These are dangerous outside the confines of the ROM, since
trying to launch such a beast on a device without appropriate overlay
support (or without the appropriate overlay) can cause serious
mayhem...or at least an ugly crash. For this reason the developer
tools don't support the creation of stripped bases.
>A little sluthing on the German roms, for the To Do List built in
>applications reveals the following:
>To Do List (appl/todo) - 6 resources (ovly, 2 code, data, tver, pref)
>To Do List_deDE (ovly/todo) - 23 resources (ovly, tAIN, 2 tAIB, x tFRM, x
>tSTR, etc..)
>
>The app contains NO UI display resources, these are all in the overlay!
>
>Poking into the overlay resource in the To Do List and its overlay.prc
>reveals:
>[OmOverlaySpecType component: To Do List value(s) / To Do List_deDE
>value(s)]
>version: 00 04 / 00 04
>flags: 00 00 00 03 / 00 00 00 00
>baseChecksum: FF FF 61 52 / FF FF 61 52
>targetLocale: 00 00 00 17 / 00 02 00 08
>baseDBType: 'appl' / 'appl'
>baseDBCreator: 'todo'/ 'todo'
>baseDBCreateDate: 00 00 00 00 / B4 85 32 BA
>baseDBModDate: 00 00 00 00 / B4 85 32 BA
>numOverlays: 00 16 / 00 16
>overlays[0]: tAIB / tAIN
>overlays[1]: tAIN / tAIB
>overlays[2]: tAIB / tAIB
>
>So, PRC2OVL can generate the overlay (how to edit?) but how do we construct
>the corresponding ovly resource in the base prc?
You don't actually need the ovly resource in the base. If it exists,
then the OS can be faster about verifying the overlay against the
base, but even without it you can use the overlay...it just takes
longer to verify that each entry found in the overlay's 'ovly'
contains information that matches the length/checksum of the
referenced resource in the base. Obviously a stripped base _must_
have an overlay resource, since the original data is gone.
I don't know whether there's a PRC2OVL option to inject an overlay
resource into the base, but if not then that's a useful enhancement.
Potentially PalmRez could also be modified to have an option for
adding the overlay to the generated PRC.
-- Ken
Ken Krugler
TransPac Software, Inc.
<http://www.transpac.com>
+1 530-470-9200
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