Is your question philosophical, or did you have an example? Philosophically speaking, if you're talking about the system ROM, you shouldn't touch it. Your question is like asking why you shouldn't re-write and stick in your own code in Windows XP. If its not designed to allow others besides the O/S manufacturer to do things in there, don't mess with it. If you flash your ROM incorrectly, you may not be able to flash it back (depending on the design) and you may have a brand new paperweight. Sometimes the only way is to get new chips. Stuff in there is by nature device dependent (sometimes even more so than which model you have, eg. which stepping of the processor, etc). What will you do if someone installs an upgraded O/S patch? Are you sure your code will not effect things adversely? Why would anyone actually consider this? (Device drivers and established methods of adding code are an exception to this by design, and even that code has to be very well tested and rigorously conforming).
Now, if your talking about something on a flash card, that's a whole different story. Basically, use common sense: If you're not writing O/S-device-driver type of stuff (systems development), don't mess with the ROM, stick to application development and use the API, that's what its there for. BTW, if the Flash ROM has the boot code in it that would read any data to re-flash itself, and you screw that up, how is the device ever going to load any recovery data? Think of it as getting your BIOS chip in your computer very screwed up such that even if you wanted to re-flash your BIOS and recover, how would you get the computer with the screwed up BIOS to even recognize the keyboard, the disk drive or anything else it would need? In essence, its brain damaged. How do you re-program a brain when its permanently lost all sensory perception? > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Hemon > Dey > Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 2:16 PM > To: Palm Developer Forum > Subject: Re: Is a self-starting app possible > > > > you could store it in the rom (not recommended) > > How do you go abouts storing the program in ROM? and why is it not > recommended? ... is this because it wont be supported on > different devices, > or are there even problems with the ones that do support flash ROM? > > Hemon > > > > -- > For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to > unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/ > -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
