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How can I change the background image of my Yamakawa ? The Yamakawa rom includes the background image you see when you switch the player on,as show in the screenshot below; Read the Disclaimer! Tip: consider visiting the Yamakawa DVD group at Yahoo groups!

Before you start ...

There is a neat trick to change this image to a drawing you made, for example, with Photoshop.
On this page I only explain how to put your image in the rom file.

Details for updating your firmware and risks that come with that ares explained on the Yamakawa Firmware Update page.

Note: you will need a firmware rom file and a firmware password file. Download version 3H here.

Step 1; Get the right files

For injecting a new image in the rom file, you will need a tool to help you with that. YST is such a tool, download version 0.99a here. Unfortunally the YST homehape is dead,... so this is it ...

You will also need, as mentioned before, the ROM files, download version 3H here. You can also visit the Yamakawa Firmware Update page to find out what I'm talking about and where to get different versions.

Step 2; Create a drawing

You will now need a bitmap/image with the dimensions 704 x 576. The image can be 24 bits in depth.

You can draw this in your favorite drawing program like Photoshop, Corel PhotoPaint, MSPaint, etc. Save the image as a BMP, make sure you do not use RLE compression.

This is the image I used for testing, click on it to download the zipped image;

Step 3; Get image and convert it

Now we start the YST tool which you just downloaded. If you didn't do so yet, please unzip the file, for example using WinZip.

Double click the "YST099a.exe" icon to start YST.

First we set the "Firmware" to "USER".

Next we select the BMP image we created in step 2 uding the "..." button next to "BMP-File".

Now you check "Auto" and set "Rate" to "1".

Now press the "Convert BMP" button which will convert the BMP to a BIN format. This will take a while and you will see "Please Wait ..." on the "Convert BMP" button. You will also see the "Rate" field increase up to a value until size ("Kb") reached appr. 17 Kb.

Depending on the complexity of the source BMP image it can take a while (I have seen "18" and "31" in the "Rate" field).

If you used a wrong file format, an error will occure.

As soon as conversion is done, you will notice 3 additional buttons called "Preview", "BIN Preview" and "Save". Also a dropdownbox appears as shown in the screenshot below:

You can use "Preview" to review the selected original BMP, and "BINPreview" to see the converted result (MPEG2-format).

Note: Do not use the "Close Window" cross when using "Preview", it will close the program ! Simply click on the image shown.

Step 4; Insert the image in the ROM file

Now you can select the rom file you want the picture to be inserted to by pressing the "..." button. Before you do so, make sure the ROM file is NOT set to READ-ONLY. If the file is read-only an error will ocure as shown below:

It might happen that the firmware you are using is not yet analyzed by YST. YST needs this to locate the start-position in the rom-file of the current image, so it knows where to put the new image without damaging the actual rom-code. My first attempt confused me too, since there is no additional information, like a readme.txt, that explains what is going wrong.

If "Version" in the lower right corner, does not show the version (default 3C) you are using (I used 3H for this purpose) the you should click the "Search Position and Size" button to locate the proper image start position.

After a few seconds a requester will popup asking you to save the values in the INI file.
Note: "PicSize" should be appr. 17 Kb, other (definitly larger) values indicate a FAILURE ! Restart YST to get a proper value !

Select "Yes" so the value is saved for future use.

Now set your preferences for "Name" (Yamakawa), "Model" (715), "Mode" (PAL) and "Language" (English).

You can ignore the "3C" in the "Version" field in the lower right corner if you used the "Search Position and Size" button. Maybe in a future version this value will be updated automatically ... who knows ...

Click now the "Insert Picture" button. A message (shown below) confirms the succesfull insertion of the image:

Now you're almost finished. The ROM file is ready for use, we still need to change the "APASSWD" file.

Step 5; Adapt "Apasswd" file

We still need to adapt the "apasswd" file, use "Create APASSWD" to do so. The "apasswd" file, that came with the rom file will be altered for this purpose !

If you want more information, then please take a look at the Yamakawa Update Firmware page, section "Edit password file".

Step 6; Update firmware

Please take a look at the Yamakawa Firmware Update page on how to use these rom and apasswd files.

The result

After updating the firmware, my Yamakawa now boots using my own image: