I purchased a Japanese Sony Clie PEG-UX50: can I turn it into an English device?

If you've known me for a certain amount of time, sooner or later the subject of my fascination for the Palm OS ecosystem might have come up. For the people who are unfamiliar with this particular fascination, a little backstory. 

How did my fascination with Palm OS begin?

When I was about 13 years old it was apparent that I had some issues organising certain things in my life (such as: homework, showing up at violin lessons on time, time keeping in general). I'm not sure how, but at some point my love for Tech led me to a solution: I could get a second hand Palm OS PDA to help me! I'd just put every appointment and deadline in this thing, and it would remind me whenever I'd need to do something. 

This first device was a Sony Clie 4.x device (the PEG-N760C), and after that I upgraded to a Clie NR70, a Tungsten T2, Tungsten T3 and finally the LifeDrive. From the devices listed here I sold the Clie's, broke the T2 and I still have the T3 & LifeDrive. 

However, now that phones were getting smarter and smarter my need for a PalmOS PDA as a daily driver decreased. Feature phones could sync with Google Calendar and even Email and RSS clients were prevalent in most feature phones in the era of 3G connectivity. Once I upgraded from a Sony Ericsson W850i to the W960i (which ran Symbian) I ditched the PalmOS devices altogether. 

I do not speak Japanese

These days I am used to being able to reboot a device into a DFU or Fastboot/Bootloader mode where I can supply a ROM file or update to change the firmware of a device. We see this in the RP2040, Android phones, 4G USB dongles, hardware wallets, fitness trackers. When I purchased a Sony Clie PEG-UX50 on Sendico I somehow forgot about the fact that at the time firmware updates were nowhere as available as they are today. Oh, and the fact that Palm OS devices had different ROMS based on the region where it was used. If you purchased your device in Japan, you only have Japanese applications inst
alled and nothing else to choose from. Which I did. And I don't speak (or read) Japanese.

The issue here is that if a device hasn't received a firmware update from the manufacturer in it's lifecycle, you'll have to resort to reverse engineering the protocol using 0 resources. Because at the time manufacturers didn't really follow a reference protocol for these things. In some cases you send some magic bytes over serial, and everything you send afterwards is directly written to the flash chip. In other cases a protocol has been used for several generations of devices from the same manufacturer. Sometimes a Windows updating app was released to end users, sometimes a .prc file patched ROM files (so the update changes only live in RAM. If you fully deplete your battery, your device returns to its unpatched state). 

A compromise: Install PRC files to RAM

Dmitry Grinberg is one of the Palm OS heroes. Their fascination with the OS has led to software that was amazing when Palm OS was "alive", but grew even more when it died. Nowadays Dmitry is working on making Palm OS 5.x work on Palm OS 4.x devices by use of a SDIO/Memory Stick containing an ARM CPU, this project is called rePalm. It's worth a read if you're curious. 

However in the process of discovering what makes a Palm OS ROM tick Dmitry came up with this concept of 'split ROMS', a format that allows him to decompose a ROM dump into files, while maintaining the ability to assemble back to a valid ROM again. Luckily he had a split rom for the en_US UX50, so I could extract the zip and install the PRC files to see which ones break, and which ones don't.

Preliminary findings

Installing general.prc from the split ROM causes the system to fail during a soft reset. However, installing the following files translates most of the preferences:

• BluetoothPnl.prc
• Buttons.prc
• Date & Time_enUS.prc
• Digitizer_enUS.prc
• Formats_enUS.prc
• General_enUS.prc
• Network_enUS.prc
• Owner_enUS.prc
• Phone_enUS.prc
• Preferences_enUS.prc
• Security_enUS.prc
• ShortCuts_enUS.prc
• SpecialSetupPnl.prc

Note: any file that has a _enUS postfix will have to be copied to internal memory first (I used FileZ to do this), and then renamed (to _jpJP) using Bird (or something similar). This allows the native applications to load the text strings as if they were the "native" translations for the app. It looks like the actual application code is the same for most of these "preference"applications. 

Other applications that can be installed from the split ROM:

• I don't have a detailed description for these, I installed all four of these and my Grafitti panel stopped showing the Japanese characters, so I was happy. But you might need only one of these files to achieve that. 
• StatusBar.prc
• StatusBarSkin.prc
• StdInput.prc
• StdInSoftGSkin.prc 
• LauncherCW.prc - This is the Clie 3D launcher
• I recommend installing CLIELauncherDefaultList.prc as well, this way you can reset some of the japanese app descriptions to their english counterparts easily. 
• CardInfo_enUS.prc
• Calculator_enUS.prc
• HotSync_enUS.prc
• Address Book.prc
• Address Sort Library.prc
• AudioPlayer.prc
• CLIEFiles.prc
• CLIECamera.prc
• CLIEAlbum.prc
• ClieAlbumDbMgr.prc
• CLIEAlbum_GroupDB.prc
• CLIEAlbum_TemplateDB.prc
• CLIEMemo

Files to avoid touching:

• DAL.prc
• General.prc
• Boot.prc

Conclusion

So: it might be hard to impossible to achieve a cross-region ROM flash for these devices because the manufacturer never released any ROM updates, so the update mechanism would have to be reverse engineered, which likely means sacrificing devices in the process. 

However, by using split rom archives, we can install translation files of most of the preferences to the device RAM and change their identifier (from _enUS to _jpJP) so that the system thinks they should use these translation files instead of the ones in ROM. This allows us to use the device (mostly) as if it were an English device. The translation files are ususally small and it shouldn't be a huge sacrifice to have these installed in RAM for most people. 

Some of the CLIE apps include their text strings in the app itself. This means that the entire app needs to be installed in RAM. Whether this is worth it is up to the user. But CLIE Album is a few hundred KB, so it might not be worth it if you never use that particular app. 

If I make any significant future discoveries I'll share them here. Hopefully sharing this knowledge has been useful to others. If it was, please let me know by leaving a comment. 

So PalmOS is really dead now?

I've been enjoying me PalmOS devices for quite some time now. First as an organizer and multimedia device and later as part of my collection of obsolete technology. What I really liked about PalmOS was it's speed and 'simplicity' if I may call it that. Of course I'm looking at an of from the past, knowing that there are a lot of OSes for portable devices that have a lot of features that PalmOS never had.

In the past years I've had a Sony Clie PEG-N760C and a PEG-NR70V. Later I upgraded to the Tungsten T2, then the T3 and finally the LifeDrive (which I've upgraded to an 8GB CompactFlash card). Of all those devices, only the T3 and the LifeDrive are still with me (and in working order :D). Recently I acquired a Palm Tungsten T|X, which was one of the last devices that Palm made before switching over to WebOS on the Pre series of smartphones. I was surprised to find that this device actually has received a patch/update to support WPA2 and WPA Enterprise! That is friggin AWESOME! While the Tungsten T|X only has Wireless B built in (802.11b = 11mbps) it works, and the device probably wouldn't be able to handle much more throughput anyway. Because the digitiser was broken, I ordered a new one from eBay, and it was pretty easy to replace it. It seemed like I had a high-end PalmOS device with WiFi, Bluetooth and a "high res" screen.

This is how I got started on wanting to revive PalmOS, at least from a developers perspective. I wanted to write (or port) a JSON library and use it to interact with REST API's or something. Or a remote control for my home automation system. Or basically anything that I could code that did not exist yet for PalmOS. But I hit a few roadblocks.

Lack of documentation and community

There isn't a lot of 'publicly available' documentation on PalmOS development. While the SDK docs can be found in some of the deep dark corners of the web, and a development environment can be set up, there is just no active community at all. It seems like development has stopped for about 10 years (or more!) and all what is left is these obsolete devices that are not able to use most of their functionality. Considering the fact that the devices aren't sold anymore, there is no market for software development on PalmOS and you're not actually gaining anything other than personal satisfaction (most people have forgotten that PalmOS existed at all!) this seems reasonable.

SSL Certificate support is limited to SHA1

While some tools exist to convert CA root certificates to PDB files, the PalmOS does not support SHA256 certificates. This means that most of the HTTPS interwebs is not reachable from the browsers, and secure communication is basically impossible. Most companies that have a WPA2 Enterprise-secured WiFi-network use an SHA256 certificate and this makes using the Tungsten T|X on a corporate network (or country-wide WiFi-hotspot network like the Dutch Ziggo WiFiSpots) impossible. SHA256 has been used in at least one application that I know of, pssh2. Unfortunately re-using this code in an application and rewriting part of PalmOS are two different things.

So what can we still do with our legacy devices?

When these devices were still awesome, a lot of cool stuff has been made. And because the internet was not as big as it is today, most of these apps work offline! Over the next few weeks I'm going to show a few applications that I've used in the past decade and might be nice for you to re-live the PalmOS days again :).

Felix from the 2022 here:

The PalmDB community strives to host files for abandoned projects as well as ROMs for devices and other useful tools. Check it out here. They have a Discord as well! Also Dmitry Grinberg is hacking Palm OS like there is no tomorrow, and there is a guide on how you can get started with a toolchain for PalmOS development here. Of course there is a subreddit as well: /r/Palm. Have fun!