PA-2400U software problems

I picked up a Casio PA-2400U from Used Handhelds last week. Neat little computer. However, I’ve found two pieces of software that don’t play well on the device.

The first is ResInfo. Most of it works fine, except the battery meter doesn’t display properly. When checking the battery, it only displays “Battery charge: Unknown.” Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to make it work? Does anyone have any suggestions of another tray-based battery meter that I might try?

The second is Utopiasoft Hum. I tried version 1.62. It plays but the volume slider sits on top of the control panel and the volume slider will not work. This is probably because of the odd screen size of the PA-2400U. It’s 480x240 and not 640x240. I know that HUM can be skinned. Does that include the ability to move the volume slider to a different part of the screen? Has anyone ever made a 480x240 skin? Does anyone have any suggestions of other MP3 players that I might try?

Thanks,
Rick

Does the Windows Media Player v1.2 work okay on it? You could always run the portrait mode software and run old ppc software on it I believe. But then you'd have to hard reset to return to landscape. If I remember correctly, I used to use Conduits Pocket Player on my old Cassiopeia and Mobilepro 200 that had the same screen format you have. Seems I had to use the desktop skin designer for it though. I might still have that skin...I'll look around and see.

Rich, WMP 1.2 is for CE 2.11 and above. And even the first Palm-size PCs ran CE 2.01, and required aygshell.dll for most apps. (The PA-2400W is the CE 2.11 device - the PA-2400U runs CE 2.0.)

I've never seen ResInfo display the battery percentage on a CE 2.0 device. I don't know why, though. As for Hum, I've never had good experience with it as an installed app - it's painfully slow. (The version in ROM on my Jornada 430SE Palm-size PC, though, works wonderfully.) Xaudio seems to work better, but any monochrome device will struggle with MP3s due to the device's low power output.

Rich: I tried Windows Media Player v1.2 and it won’t load, saying the PA-2400U is an unsupported device. I also downloaded an older copy of Conduits Pocket Player. It works, but in a vertical format on a horizontal screen you’re missing some of the buttons. I don’t think it’s really worth it to load the Casio screen rotation software to use it – I’d have to rename the dll, load it and reset each time I use it. However, if you come across the skin you used, let me know and I’ll retry it.

CE Geek: I tried Xaudio and it works fine, thanks for the suggestion. Now I can play my old radio shows.
Also, ResInfo does work on some WinCE 2.0 machines. I’ve been using it for years on a MobilePro 700. As an experiment, I just tried in on two different SH3 machines. The first was a Casio A-22T – the battery meter didn’t work. The second device I tried was an HP 360LX and the battery meter worked fine. Go figure… It’s got me stumped.

Rick

Here you go...attached is a skin that should work fine. It is just the default skin that I slightly modded to fit your screen. It's 239 pixels wide and 236 pixels tall. I remapped the play and pause keys only so they would fit. SH3 version attached.

If you decide to do it yourself, there are only two gif files that you need to edit along with the script.txt file. The lines you want to edit there are these two:

BUTTON PLAY,100,101,RECT[10;185;48;227],10,185,47,47,10,185,47,47
BUTTON PAUSE,100,101,RECT[194;199;223;225],194,199,33,33,194,199,33,33

Basically, with the pause button, the [194,199, 223, 225] defines the location of the top left and bottom right corners of the active area. The other set outside the number, same values, except with the 33, 33, set the response area. The 33, 33 is the size of the active rectangle I believe. Been a long long long time since I did one of these, so I'm working only on FAULTY memory.

But if I remember, what I did was take the default screen and moved the buttons, and then changed the skin parameters to match their location. Seems to me that with the old tool that Conduits provided, it would show you X/Y axis point locations as you moved the mouse, so there was no guess work involved. Anyways, it should work...hopefully, if not, you can certainly edit it easily enough.

I don't know if the skin tool is still available from Conduits or not...you might try and see...



Attachments
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PocketPlayer.SH3.CAB (390KB - 2 downloads)