Thread: Testing NTU maps on an old Nuvi 1340T

@asprin624
The initial problematic use of NTU in 11xx/12xx/3xx/14xx series has been discussed in scattered threads on the forum many years ago but it's not so easily found so thanks for succinctly bringing it together here in a discussion thread.

Although old, the 1xxx devices are versatile, light, robust and were sold in very large numbers. Therefore, many are still in use. It was the last highly popular series to be designed solely for NT map use (1xxx was released in 2009?), shortly before Garmin introduced NTU in parallel with NT mapping for Europe to cater specifically for Cyrillic based languages.

There certainly were initial problems with 1xxx using NTU in the past, particularly with address search and not limited to addresses with non-Latin characters either. However, at some point Garmin did a firmware update, probably in late 2012 when there was a flurry of updates from 5.90 to 6.20 in a short space of time (they withdrew V6.00 quickly too, due to some flaws). Although there's no specific explanatory note in the Change History, one of those hastily issued versions allowed at least partial compatibility with NTU maps. That fix mostly eliminated the address search errors. However, only fully compatible devices have this entry in their GarminDevice.xml: "<Name>UnicodeMaps</Name>". That's lacking in 1xxx and earlier series XMLs and only appears in the fully NTU compatible devices starting with nuvi 2xxx/3xxx from around 2010 onwards. That said, 1xxx devices with later firmware mostly will function properly using NTU maps and even ancillary files such as JCVs work ok.

I don't use NTU mapping "on the ground" as I'm not in Europe but welcome any discussion and posted experiences in this thread from members using NTU EU in 1xxx devices.

Super interesting to read this facts. are there any other series that were like this?

No as I can recall. Earlier devices than 1xxx (e.g. some StreetPilots, nuvi 2xx/7xx and related devices) remain stuck with NT or earlier OF (non-NT) mapping use.

There was a case of Honda Goldwing devices (somewhat related to OF-only StreetPilot 26x0 series) getting a firmware upgrade to enable additional use of NTs when earlier version fw only allowed OF maps.

Therefore, if they wanted Garmin could probably issue upgrades for any legacy devices to use later format mapping. Maybe even OF>NT>NTU is possible in theory. They'd never do it though. Not quite intentional obsolescence of course, many older devices wouldn't be physically capable of dealing with the very large size and high compression of modern map image files regardless.

Other fw upgrades were done for nuvi 2xx/7xx and related series to increase the usable map .IMG size limit from 2 GiB to 4 GiB, the former being the previous FAT size limit and the latter the FAT32 limit. They can likely do something similar to allow use of exFAT or even NTFS format if they wanted to do, which they don't. Although loosely based on the UNIX/Linux types of operating systems, i guess as much as Windows is based but in quite different ways, Garmin proprietary OS is quite opaque even to skilled hackers or maybe they're just not interested enough to bother with meddling with it, unlike the somewhat hackable Win OSs. Garmin's OS is quite the polar opposite of the "please-hack-me" Open-Source Linux versions.