I got it! "I agree" killer! Cheap, easy, but...

[BobA]

Nate, CONGRATS on the new daughter...

Bob Andersen

[naterprius]

Thanks. She came home in the Prius on Dec 21, born on Dec 18.

Nate

[naterprius]

Jackpot! It's much, much higher level than I thought.

Check this out:

http://kiwi-w.mapmaster.co.jp/format_engli...rmat_kihon.html

It defines how the disc is structured, bit by bit.

Way cool.

Nate

[efusco]

Jackpot! It's much, much higher level than I thought.

Check this out:

http://kiwi-w.mapmaster.co.jp/format_engli...rmat_kihon.html

It defines how the disc is structured, bit by bit.

Way cool.

Nate

That is very cool...do you know what to do with it? Will it give you a software solution?

[naterprius]

The bad news, the previous mod finally caught up with me; the lights were dim in the Prius, and while in IG-ON, it started complaining about a malfunction in the parking device. (Everything went away when I "started" the car).

Oh well, that's it for this mod, I guess.

I'll keep working on software solutions.

Nate

[mss]

I'm planning a call and probably a letter to Toyota Corporate on this one. Do you think if enough of us are vocal on this point that they might actually change it?

Was this a "feature" in the classic prius?

If you actually read the notice when the car was in motion you could argue that it could be enough of a distraction to cause an accident.

[naterprius]

I tried to make a test disc with some modified files. Unfortunately, I only have a single layer burner, and I tried to reduce the size by eliminating some material. I think I have a bug in my format; the burned copy (dvd-r) didn't work. I'll keep trying to figure this out. Nero is complaining that the ISO format won't allow a file over 2 GB. When I switched to UDF, there were options I didn't understand, and I'm not sure I picked the right ones.

More research required...

Nate

[xevious]

Nate,

I just discovered this thread. It's nice to see that someone's level of irritation with the legal cop-out screen became sufficient enough to warrant some invasive experimentation!

I have quite a bit of experience with disc mastering; I'll take a look at the nav disc tomorrow and report any interesting findings. I'm assuming that the disc uses an early UDF format, either version 1.0 or 1.1. Using Nero, your best bet would be to enable the "Xbox compatibility mode" option, which will produce a very generic UDF image. Even if your disc is the correct format, it is entirely possible that the navigation system's DVD-ROM is incapable of reading recordable media. I'll have to experiment a bit.

Definitely pass the file that you suspect to be firmware along to your VxWorks experienced friend! Reverse engineering the firmware is probably going to be the only practical way of turning that idiot screen off.

I'm surprised that the firmware isn't encrypted; apparently, Denso/Toyota isn't worried about this kind of attack. I would expect that there is a hash, or at the very least a checksum associated with the firmware.

In response to an earlier comment, I believe that the navigation discs do contain firmware, and when upgrading to a newer version, the on-board EEPROM is updated to match. I base this on the fact that I've upgraded my nav three times now (been complaining about the shoddy database for over a year). Each time, the dealer quoted two hours to perform the work, so each time I talked them into giving me the DVD and simply swapped the discs myself. When an updated disc is loaded, the system displays a prompt to the effect of "updating - do not turn off" for a few minutes, then reboots and happily continues telling you where you are and where you're going.

Keep up the interesting work, and I'll let you know what I find!

-Steven

[naterprius]

Thanks for the tip! I just found out someone on PriusOnline.com has already made some similar discoveries about Kiwi.

Thanks for the tip on the XBox compatibility mode. I'll give it a try.

As far as firmware on the disc, I don't believe it's truly firmware. The kiwi system seems to be a very high level interpretive language, leaving no provision for new firmware. The kiwi documentation indicates a "user introduction" component in the loading module. I suspect this is where the disclaimer is located. Unfortunately, the documentation seems to be lacking enough info to completely decipher the kiwi file structure.

I located the section of "code" that contains the "I agree" and disclaimer. I used to think that this was simply a static variable referenced by some binary code executed elsewhere. I now suspect that the whole thing is a string with tags indicating to the system that the text should be displayed as buttons and that the system should wait until the "I agree" is pushed before continuing. Therefore, my strategy will be to blank out that section with Hex 00 and burn a new DVD, and see what happens on the screen.

I'll keep you posted.

Nate

[mss]

Nate:

What a coup if you could do that.

My first question to the board is: Has anyone successfully made a backup copy of the DVD and successfully run the burned copy in the ECU??

Thank you for putting in the time to test this!

I would gladly pull the stock DVD and "burn" my own copy if it would diasble that stupid message.

I recently got a dual layer DVD burner for a PC I own running windows XP. I would be happy to try burning a DVD for this purpose.