JP1 Remotes

I have now posted development build v2.15.8 of RMIR in the RMIR Development folder on SourceForge. This now includes an interpreter for displaying the user files of an XSight Touch/Color remote in a readable form. These remotes have a file store in place of the EEPROM/Flash data area of other remotes. What is displayed in the Raw Data panel of RMIR is in fact a concatenation of the binaries of these user files. Until now there has been no way to view these files in a human-readable form.

This interpreter fills that need. It is a new RMIR tab, XSight File Data. To enable it, load a setup for such a remote, which makes the XSight operations submenu visible on the Advanced menu. Check the item Show XSight file data on this submenu. This is a persistent option so you only have to do it once. This tab will then display whenever an XSight Touch/Color setup is loaded. Here is a screenshot giving an example for the form in which files are displayed:

Sorry, what sort of file format is this?

They are binary-coded XML files. I don't know if this is a concept outside of UEI, but that is what they are. Here is the story. When you download or upload to an XSight Touch/Color, you do so separately for each user file by name, such as "devices.xcf". Each such binary file starts with "EZRC .bxml10" as an ASCII string (there are four spaces after the EZRC but they don't show here). This is followed by a two-byte length, a one-byte count and a sequence of zero-terminated ASCII strings that are tag names. The count is the number of strings, the length is their total length.

This is all metadata, the true file data follows these strings. This file data consists of a sequence of items, each being one of two sorts. It is either a tag start code, a length byte and data of that length or is a tag end code. A tag start code is an index into the tag name list, a tag end code is the start code with bit 7 set. This mapping of tag codes to tag names varies between files. It is only the tag name that is significant. So the metadata enables the true file data to be converted into an XML file, after which the metadata has no further significance.

The display in my interpreter gives the name, start code and length for each start tag and the name and end code for each end tag. The semantics of the data for each tag is something that I had to work out when developing RMIR support for these remotes, just as we have to work out the semantics of each segment type. My interpreter gives the semantic translation in bold at the end of each line. This is not part of the file.

This is the structure of all files with a .xcf extension. There are also files with a .pkg extension. These encode icon images and have an entirely different structure.