Upgrading Firmware: What Actually Happens?

[Lobo]

I've been reading lot's of posts recently about many games which won't run and just get a black screen, and the truth is it sounds to me like they don't have SDL installed.

When I first got my Gippex, I tried quake and prboom and some other games and always just got a black screen, till I read somewhere that I needed to install SDL first: after that my problems went away. That was on 1.4 FW.

Now I'm on 2.0, and I haven't reinstalled SDL, but my games still work as always.
So, all of this leads me to the question: When you upgrade your FW what exactly happens?

I thought that it basically wiped EVERYTHING on the system partition and then re-installed the entire OS, which would mean that the SDL I installed in 1.4 should have been completly wiped when I changed to 2.0. But my games still work.

So there are two possibilities:
1. during a FW change the OS isn't wiped, simply some things are updated and others are left untouched.
2. everything gets wiped and FW 2.0 comes with a preinstalled SDL.

Anyone know what happens?

 

[Shikaku]

2. happens

 

[woogal]

All fw versions include the main SDL library and some of the additional libraries. Fw2 just contains more of the additional libraries. If Quake didn't work for you before then you were doing something else wrong and it had nothing to do with any libraries (Quake, like most apps, is static linked which means it includes all the libraries it needs and doesn't rely on the ones installed on the gp2x). Installing the additional SDL libraries is in many cases a placebo and the actual problem is solved by something else which just happens to be done around the same time.

 

[Lobo]

Cheers for the answers lads.

Placebos eh? Yeah, that sounds just about right. I might have actually started reading readmes between "not having working games", installing SDL, and then "having working games" which might also have influenced the outcome