I promised updates on milestones. We now have code (thanks again to encode.ru's moderator!) to compress the main program as well as decompress. The encoder was done "blind" so it is not perfect, once I can get raw memory dumps from flash, it will need to be tweaked. No code/algorithm for encoding LZ98 exists anywhere, all of the Roland products that use this compression only have the decoding logic in them (which makes total sense).
If all of this doesn't work out, a last resort will be to either not compress at all or use something different (read: easier). This will involve modifying the boot program, which I really don't want to do, but will if I have to. I also don't know yet how much flash there is to store the entire firmware blob. They may have compressed for a number of reasons - smaller download, obfuscation, or flash limitations/footprint.
New MV should be here tomorrow, and I'll start wiring up a debug harness to the old one. First steps will be trying to dump flash and write to flash, and then I will try something simple like modifying a string in the main program and loading it. :fingerscrossed:
