Creative ZEN

[MRJOE8010]

Chris, I think the bootloader is not initializing the video drivers correctly on my machine, I get vertical multi-color dots even during boot up, RockBox skin is visible on menu and sub screens.  I put .jpg and .bmp files on internal and SD drives and the file manager doesn't see them, it locates and opens folders and .mp3 files without any problem.  4GB ZEN build 85578cd-1311255 and latest firmware.

[saratoga]

Set the view option to all files. Its in the manual.

[MRJOE8010]

I set file options to "All Files", .jpg file are now visible in the listing but do not open/display nor do .txt etc.  Also selecting "Properties" from any file does not display any info, it returns to listing. Thanks.

[saratoga]

I set file options to "All Files", .jpg file are now visible in the listing but do not open/display nor do .txt etc.  Also selecting "Properties" from any file does not display any info, it returns to listing. Thanks.

Plugins are disabled since they haven't been ported yet.  Hence, you can't actually open the files other than audio. 

[chrisjj]

Plugins are disabled since they haven't been ported yet.  Hence, you can't actually open the files other than audio.

I wonder though why you cannot get the properties of files that are audio e.g. FLACs. I get this same failure as MrJoe. And also on .M3Us.

PS MrJoe, I PMed you.

[pamaury]

I have done some rework of the lcd, trying to get it more stable. You are welcome to try with HEAD. I expect no more "vertical white lines". On the other hand, it might happen that the lcd stays black on init (after the bootloader) or after blacklight off, if that happen, please report.

NOTE: do NOT, I repeat do NOT report about issue about the lcd staying black in the bootloader, this will not get fixed by this commit this it doesn't change the bootloader. If for some reason the bootloader doesn't properly init the screen, reset the player. You can tell if it's the bootloader because the bootloader prints some version information, if you don't see those, it means the bootloader failed and you should not report.

[chrisjj]

I have done some rework of the lcd, trying to get it more stable. You are welcome to try with HEAD. I expect no more "vertical white lines".

I've now tried this update. I didn't previously get the vertical white lines fault, so I don't know if the update fixes it.

On the other hand, it might happen that the lcd stays black on init (after the bootloader) or after blacklight off, if that happen, please report.

It does happen, so here's my report.

Issue 4 - Lock-up with black screen

Conditions: Device model is Creative ZEN 8Gb and 4Gb; device units are Chris's units G,J,L; Bootloader version is V1Beta2_fb8faa10; Rockbox version is cbed7ec-131126

Description: Sometimes upon Rockbox program launch, the device goes unresponsive to buttons, showing a black screen.

Steps:

1) With the device off, press and hold the Power button to start the device.
2) See the start-up text (white on black, from the bootloader), up to the line "Executing"

Expected:  success - Rockbox start screen (logo on yellow), then main menu.
Observed: sometimes success, other times failure with a black screen, backlight on, no response to buttons, and response to reset only.

Further steps:

3) After a successful start, keep Power held.

Observed: the device restarts, and repeats this cycle until it fails as above.

Notes

* This is 100% reproducible here, on all the three units I've tried.
* Also plugging/unplugging USB sometimes leads to the same locked-up state.
* The issue is present also on Rockbox version adc5033-131121
* On a black screen, "backlight on" is seen as a faint glow, intensity changing markedly with change of angle of view.
* pamaury wrote: "For the lcd, I think I'm going to disable standby completely and simply turn off backlight because it is too unreliable at the moment." This gets my vote! I think it best to first get the port to a stable state, and only then add extras such as this small optimisation of power consumption.

[pamaury]

Note: At http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,13462.msg221482.html#msg221482 pamaury wrote: "For the lcd, I think I'm going to disable standby completely and simply turn off backlight because it is too unreliable at the moment." This gets my vote!

Thanks for the report ! Unfortunately even doing this won't fix the problem because the current driver doesn't use standby mode anymore (only on and off) and even if the it left the screen on at all time, it would still need to initialise the screen anyway on boot and this is where it fails. So it seems the problem is not gone.

The good news is, though, that your procedure works on mine: after a couple reboot I always get a black screen. This should help me a lot fixing the issue. That's a great point I still have a couple ideas on what could go wrong in the driver, assuming it's a lcd driver bug.

[chrisjj]

even if the it left the screen on at all time, it would still need to initialise the screen anyway on boot and this is where it fails.

Understood, but my suggestion arises from my suspicion that RB's action on Backlight period expiry contributes to the fail on next start-up (boot). Re Evidence, on the recent version suffering the Backlight period white screen, that start-up fail showed occasionally and much higher frequency following a white screen. Re Mechanism, perhaps the start-up initialisation is incomplete. So re Debugging, perhaps this might help you identify that incompleteness.

The good news is, though, that your procedure works on mine: after a couple reboot I always get a black screen. This should help me a lot fixing the issue. That's a great point I still have a couple ideas on what could go wrong in the driver, assuming it's a lcd driver bug.

Great! I'll watch for news. Thanks again A.

EDIT: BTW, it might help to know of an as-yet-unreported issue that might be relevant. Occasionally Rockbox start screen has the wrong colours e.g. yellowish replaced by bluish, but black not affected. This suggests the display unit's colour inversion control bit is wrong (interpreting RGB as BGR), having not been initialised. (FTR, an alternative possible cause is here ). If this persists, I'll make a detailed report.

[MRJOE8010]

Occasionally Rockbox start screen has the wrong colours e.g. yellowish replaced by bluish, but black not affected. This suggests the display unit's colour inversion control bit is wrong (interpreting RGB as BGR), having not been initialised

I am also experiencing this, Rockbox background is displayed green, and also on a couple of occasions the entire screen shifts to the right on all screens with left border starting mid-screen.  Neither condition are reliably repeatable.  4GB Zen 131126 build.

[chrisjj]

I am also experiencing this, Rockbox background is displayed green, and also on a couple of occasions the entire screen shifts to the right on all screens with left border starting mid-screen.

EDIT: Which Rockbox background, specifically? The Rockbox logo background? The menu background?

Also, do you sometimes see the image reversed top to bottom, or left to right, or both?

[MRJOE8010]

Rockbox logo screen at start up is displaying with background color change, I am still having the issue that no colored theme screens are displaying as well as vertical multicolored pixels on all screens from start up.  All graphics and colors display perfectly on OF. 

[chrisjj]

Interesting. Those dots are uniformly 1024 bytes apart in LCD pixel data sequence. That suggests to me an error in some data sequence e.g. the data is in 1024-byte blocks and there's one byte missing or added. Since the text is intact, this fault would seem to be in the background bitmap or the rendering thereof.

Joe, could you try taking a screendump? http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/ScreenDump . (I find this produces a stream of dumps rather than just the one, so inserts the USB and then remove it before changing the screen.)

And what theme is this?

[MRJOE8010]

Chris, this is stock CabbieV2 theme.  Curiously Screendump doesn't show the dots which I why I attached the photos.  I would be happy if the display looked like the Screen dumps below.  The boot and Rockbox logo screen are too quick to catch in a photo but the dots are visible from first boot and persist through all screens and all versions I have tried so far.  I am also currently experiencing crashes when removing USB.  I'm using the latest version of the bootloader and Rockbox cbed7ec-131126. Thanks.

[chrisjj]

Chris, this is stock CabbieV2 theme.

Thanks. The menu screen looks like stock cabbieV2, but the WPS looks like rockbox_failsafe. Could you post a screenshot of the WPS?

Curiously Screendump doesn't show the dots which I why I attached the photos.

Thanks - that's valuable info. The corruption I got on restore from backlight period (now fixed) was likewise absent from screendumps. I take this to indicate the corruption is not in the RB frame buffer but in the transfer to the LCD. The fact the text is intact rather than sheared suggests byte substitution rather than addition/deletion.

the dots are visible from first boot

Start-up here shows successively
 
 1) grey CREATIVE logo on black
 2) black
 3) white text on black, first line "Boot version:" ...

Which first shows the dots?