We’ll start this article by talking about SPMP8k Software images. These are the large (>50MB) IMG files generated by the SKLOGO program or found on the interweb. They contain the operating system of the device and consist of lots of binary executables, even more XML configuration files, and even more BMP files. This bunch of files is the output you get from the file dumper from the last article, although not in a nice packed single file.
It seems that when people want to change their device configuration, they are opening the IMG file and hex editing the XML’s. That will certainly work, but is probably rather difficult for the beginner.
Another approach would be to dump your device or dump an IMG file to the full directory of files, edit them as you please, and then repack into an IMG and reflash the device. At that point, you are free to add/remove/replace any images, binaries, or XML you like. I smell a lot of background image customization tools on the horizon!
As we mentioned, one very slow way to get a full backup of software from an unknown device is to dump it via the serial port. It works, and today we successfully repacked a file dump into a new IMG and flashed that image to our semi-bricked PMP to bring it back to life. But the process takes time.
If you happen to have your IMG file on hand, you can dump it to your hard drive in just seconds using the sprdump tool. This is the tool that we mentioned in the last article, and we’ve received permission from the author to release it. But in order to estimate how many people have actually downloaded it, we must force you to go to the next page.
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