Just picked up a Margi Presenter-to-go -- visor handspring VGA card
(they knocked a third off the price recently...) But of course it
only has Mac and Windows drivers (you can run Margi Mirror and put up
pixel-doubled palm apps, but the only way to get 1024x768 out of it is
to feed a pdb to the Presenter app... and those pdbs get generated via
powerpoint plugins and/or "fake" print drivers.)
The first half of figuring out the pdb format was easy enough -
for each "real" slide record there's a "text-only" slide record that
has the title and a flat-text rendition of the slide content, which
the presenter app can show on the local display.
In the "real" records, it was easy enough to pull out the color map
("CTBL" followed by 256 entries, r/g/b one-byte-per-primary values.)
Experiments show that tweaking this colormap tweaks how a given color
gets displayed. However, the slide content itself is DATA followed by
some surprisingly opaque binary data; a mostly-empty slide has a bunch
of what might be bit-level repetition, but that may be compression
artifacts of some sort. Most random changes seem to cause the card
(but not the palm app) to spin; some one-bit changes near the start of
a given record lead to drastic changes in what appears on-screen,
implying that things are stroke based, or perhaps party
compressed-bitmap based. Not quite enough (yet :-) to do FOP->pdb
conversion or anything, even starting from known text-only slides...
Anyone else made progress on this, or interested in it at all? I
haven't heard back from Margi through any of the obvious support
channels, but I haven't tried identifying engineers to poke at :-)
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