Hurricane WM6 kitchen - anyone interested?

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Over time several Hurricane have served as replacement parts for my Tornados, but they deserve a life of their own. So I have taken the effort of porting the Tornado Kitchen I had published also to the Hurricane.

I must tell you however that this device (also with the other available ROMs) has some shortcomings that I could not work around. The WM6 base and derived builds you could create with this kitchen can do the same (except some GUI tweaks that I have not ported) as the other available ready made ROMs, some things it can do better.

• Same for all Hurricane builds (old or new):
  • no WLAN/WIFI (was never there - so no surprise, but some UI elements still list that)
  • Bluetooth cannot do A2DP well (stuttering, probably transfer speed?) but it stays in the UI (Settings)
  • GSM Radio (rilgsm.dll) does not support NITZ (automatic Time/zone setting - removed that from the UI) possibly other things as well. It will do the same as all other builds, just not as much as the Tornado.
  • memory card encryption cannot work (encfilt.dll is not loaded in XIP like in all other ROMs) still in UI though
  • keyboard hotkey assignment is different to Tornado (keybd.dll calls other .lnk files)
  • there is no SDHC support (but on Tornado)
• Worse for this one (not anymore - updated ddi.dll available)
  
  • Display shows a quirk that the empty parts of the horizontal scrollbar are filled with random garbage when scrolling. No other side effects are observed yet.
• Better for this one:
  • Hotkey handling built in (see Tornado Nitrogen Kitchen)
  • WMP Keys work for left-aligned (8200) and right aligned (SDA 2) music key layout. The WMP internal plugin can be disabled for device without music keys. All settings are done via UI.
  • You can cook in what you want or stay with the minimal setup.
  • Storage memory optimized - almost all items that can be UPX-ed (see my Tornado kitchen thread) are treated.
  • HTC Camera 4.0 could also be ported from Tornado build (also keeping the brightness bug with cursor L/R - use "Reset Brightness" to cure).
  • MMS/Camera integration is very good (heritage from efforts on the Tornado builds)
  • There is a working Direct 3D driver (d3dm_ti3d.dll) active in this build. It was supposed to work in the Tornado builds already (as modules there) but it did not. Taking the file versions from a shipped S620 ROM works ok. You may never notice the gap as hardly any smartphone application uses that D3D interface.

What is special about the Hurricane? Well quite many things that make it hard to cook for it:

• It never had a native released WM5+ build. It seems that for Typhoon WM5 leaked once (Aleut's Typhoon builds are based on that as he told me) - and some parts of that leaked were also re-used in the Hurricane.
• Several (quite many) OEM specific modules cannot be easily relocated as their .reloc section is missing (like for all WM2k3 retrieved parts). Hunting this down took quite some effort.
• Only the wmreloc.exe can handle that properly and the builds that are created all work fine (except the display scrollbar quirk). No other relocation tools can handle that set of modules (I tried G'reloc, OSBuilder, ExtReloc, Platformrebuilder) so wmreloc is the wizard that makes it happen - so many thanks to the author:
  Author: dysxq
  Thanks: yifengling0@IOICN http://www.oiopda.com.cn

The available Hurricane ROMs stem from a time where re-building a ROM seemed not to work easily and actions for most were done by manipulating a ready-made build to the cook's needs. This makes using them as a base for further cooking not so easy. Thankfully none of the authors has put efforts in "protecting" his ROM.

Hello!Waiting for the kitchen!!!I tried to disassemble the Rom with your programs binfiletools.zip.
Once converted the bin in nb0, i use os builder to dump files in the rom.
Then tried to remove the speaker, and add the Russian language. Collected Rom so well with Os builder. But it does not start on the Rom tmobile sda2. Although it has betrayed the boot OS, and I could make a Hard reset and soft reset!

Well, I had a discussion about the special topics of Hurricane ROM with the guys over at asusmobile.ru - and they concluded that OSBuilder will not be able to work on such patched old ROMs.
These are missing some essential information the OSBuilder relies on. So despite I like OSBuilder kitchen very much for its options - it cannot work with any of the Hurricane ROMs I have. Basically it will not remap the modules right and so your ROMs will not boot - no way to get that solved.

OSBuilder will dump everything correctly (as far I can judge) but rebuilding will always include the remapping step and due to missing info in most OEM modules they fail to re-locate.
The old kitchen I use (basically an adapted Nitrogen Kitchen for the Tornado) plus the wmreloc.exe will create booting ROMs.

When I find time I will have another try with the Chinese WM6.5 ROM, but I doubt that the OEM parts are much different.

You should also know that the XIP part cannot change much as the nk.exe (Native Kernel) is HW dependent. The nk.exe is very old and does not support the improved memory slot allocation of WM6.5. There is however not so much memory to manage on the Hurricane - so that should not be a problem.

The kitchen I intend to release will supply a bilingual English and German ROM that could be extended by more languages or have German be replaced by any other.

It is quite tricky though to have languages added, so I have to provide a rough guide to that as well.

Well, thank you! I'll wait for your kitchen!

Hello!How many days wait kitchen?)Thanks!

oh - well got other priorities. It is ready technically but the finetuning and description is pending - please some more patience. You could prepare in decomposing some existing ROMs with OSBuilder to see what is inside. This weekend - for sure :)

Hello, Thank you again, I already dump ROM files, and saw what's inside, but the problem was that I could not run the firmware on the phone! "Maybe I did something wrong did! So I'm looking forward to your kitchen! Thanks!