[Prism54-devel] Re: USB CVS snapshot

[Karsten Richter]

Johannes Steingraeber wrote:

> For me (Medion XG-701A) it's built into wlanuig.sys. A hexdump looks
> somewhat like this:
It seems that in the meantime most prism drivers don't use the good old 
.asm files but integrate them into the .sys drivers.
Anyway knowing some of the contents of the firmware is very helpful to 
find it: simply search for the string "inlbuild" in the drivers.

All firmware files I saw contain something like this:

0000110: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 5665 7273  ............Vers
0000120: 696f 6e20 322e 342e 332e 3720 6275 696c  ion 2.4.3.7 buil
0000130: 7420 6f6e 2057 6564 204a 616e 2037 2031  t on Wed Jan 7 1
0000140: 343a 3134 3a31 3920 4345 5420 3230 3034  4:14:19 CET 2004
0000150: 2062 7920 696e 6c62 7569 6c64 4074 6978   by inlbuild at tix


 > 00000970:                               0000 a0e1              ....
 > 00000980: e0f3 9fe5 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
 > 00000990: 0100 0080 0100 0000 4c4d 3836 0200 0080  ........LM86....
 > 000009a0: 0600 0000 322e 342e 332e 3000 0000 0000  ....2.4.3.0.....

I just recently extracted a 2.4.3.7 firmware from a Shuttle PN 15 driver 
(AWUSGA02.sys) which starts with a very similar byte sequence:

0000000: 0000 a0e1 dcf3 9fe5 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
0000010: 0000 0000 0100 0080 0100 0000 4c4d 3836  ............LM86
0000020: 0200 0080 0600 0000 322e 342e 332e 3700  ........2.4.3.7.

Does anybody know what those a0e1.. bytes mean? All 2.4.3.x releases I 
was able to extract differ only in the same one or two bytes. Seems to 
be a version information. Maybe there is even the firmware size or 
checksum encoded somewhere? Does anybody know if it's possible to derive 
the firmware size from some bytes of the firmware image?
It would save some time when extracting newer firmware versions.

Regards

I/
I\arsten Richter (kasi at kasi-net.org)