Thread: Garmin Logo.bin files (12/13/14xx-37xx-34xx-35xx-22/24/23xx-760-30/40/50-200-2x5w-Montana etc)

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That one is pretty, and inverted vertically!

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Originally Posted by babj615

Thank you, Butters.

I admit I am very late to the party and am trying to learn what you already know, and information of this type is not easy to come by.

I'm far from an expert, more a hands-on enthusiast. You're probably looking for in-depth knowledge of the kind that osiris4isis has. Unlike me who's a mere journeyman, he's an experienced coder however i think the very precise inner workings of the proprietary Garmin OS are privy to only a couple if any individuals outside of Garmin's own developers.

Are 'Regions' just a term for different 'sections' of the device firmware file?

I'd avoid calling regions 'sections' because that term is used in regard to BIN component parts of a firmware file. You can see that yourself of course by looking at RGN_Tool's GUI. So the so-called regions i.e. 'sections' contained in a device's firmware file are really BIN files rather than regions themselves although they contain copies of the data to be flashed to some of the device's actual regions. The device's regions themselves are indeed 'parts' of the device's flash memory. A very simplistic way maybe would be to view Garmin's regions as somewhat akin to partitions in Windows although that's not really accurate either, more just a vague similarity.

I would be ever so grateful for a crash course in what 'regions' are, what types exist, how they are used, etc. etc.

A specific *.bin is of course a copy of the data contained in a particular RGN (region) of which there are 255 separate ones possible, however nowhere near all of them are populated or indeed even present on a particular Garmin device. You're already quite aware of RGN16 (0x10) of course and in particular of it's function to do with the splash screen/logo during boot. It can also control/suppress/enable some features in the firmware of some devices, nuvi 1xxx series being a great example of that. Some regions are virtual, RGN12 (0x0C) for example. It's responsible for flashing two physical regions, RGN5 and RGN43, in turn and it makes up the boot.bin component (section) of a firmware file, be it a *.gcd or an *.rgn file. Continuing the somewhat nebulous Windows analogy, RGN5 can be thought of as being like the BIOS/UEFI of a PC, it's in fact the device's bootloader. Messing with RGN5 is often fatal although sometimes a good copy of it is retained in RAM and can be accessed by the device if the device hasn't been forced off. The naming of "boot.bin" is therefore misleading because it in fact contains the ramloader, not the bootloader which is in RGN5 although the latter is ultimately flashed by the virtual RGN12 which is flashed by boot.bin as required. The visible file system in modern MSM/MTP devices is itself a region, RGN48 in older devices and RGN83 in recent ones, these can be 'dumped' like other regions and the resultant BIN file can be opened to reveal folders and files using several programs, 7-Zip and other archive softs, PowerISO etc. The basic operating firmware is mostly contained in RGN14 (0x0E), Garmin calls it 'System Software'. If 14 is empty or corrupt then the device cannot start and 'System Software Missing' is displayed on the screen with the device defaulting to a preboot state and accessible by updater.exe and other 3rd party programs such as G7ToWin. Many regions that are populated are not really understood and their specific purpose remains unclear, at least to mere mortals like me. Prior to their devices having visible file systems, Garmin had ones which the flash memories were entirely made up of specialized regions, this is the origin of the large number of possible regions, i.e. 255 of them. Where modern Mass Storage capable devices have Voice, Text, Keyboard etc. files in the visible file system, older 'region-only' devices have the data in specific regions, for example Voices in RGN17 in my recollection. While it's still possible to 'flash', for example, a Voice file (*.vpm) packed as an RGN file with boot.bin, it's not flashed to RGN17 as with early devices rather it's converted to a ZIP file and placed in the device's file system in RGN48 or 83 and then subsequently unpacked by the device on next boot and the VPM file placed into the Voice folder of RGN48/83. Another very important region is RGN41 in older devices/RGN154 in recent ones. It's primary function is well-known as being the device's non-volatile memory containing individual information about the particular device, it's registration and unlock codes for instance. It's generally encrypted in simple XOR and just like the file GarminDevice.xml, it's meant to be updated/rewritten on each boot cycle. It can be restored from a backup BIN file however making alterations to a decrypted nonvol BIN then re-encrypting and flashing back seems to fail badly, perhaps quite understandably. You now get the general idea i'm sure.

Others may be able to give clearer or more detailed explanation if you wish to dive deeper.