custom rom

Merlion NG v1.61 creates its own milestone

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Ever since I started building the new series of Merlion Leo ROM, I started to see more interest probably because it’s based on the new Windows Mobile 6.5 platform. Lately, I have updated the ROM with newer version of drivers and the necessary configurations,  and that  was a huge performance booster!

There must be some correlation between the number of clicks the ROM download link got, versus the performance of the ROM. Within 2 days of release, it got more than 200 of clicks. Okay, not a great deal for the mainstream  ROMs like Miri or Energy, or the actual download is approximately just 3/4 of of the clicks. Regardless,that’s a significant milestone for Merlion NG series in my humble opinion.

The demographic of my user base is pretty much expected. Since I have build the Chinese Simplified Input/Display support, I would naturally anticipate most of the users to come from a Chinese populated location. So users from Singapore & China made up close to 60% of Merlion NG series total user base. What’s interesting is I do have users from the Europe & Middle East countries.

If you have not flashed the latest Merlion NG series ROM (v1.65), you should because you never know what you have been missing until you have tried it. Some had even described the ROM to be on steroid,  or on drug cocktail!  Don’t believe? See the below performance chart of the NG series ROM performance.

If the chart above does not give you much context, just imagine this. A stock (i.e. official) ROM would only achieve a total SPB benchmark index of 1590. In comparison to the latest release of Merlion NG series, the latter is 2 times faster! Even for the first generation of Merlion series, v2.68 is generally one of the better performing ROM among the rest of HD2 custom ROMs, so I will not be surprised, if we were to put a ranking table to compare the performance of all the custom ROMS in xda-developers or htcpedia, Merlion NG series should be in the top ranks, if not right at the top 😉

Venturing into ROM cooking

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And I meant ROM as Read-Only-Memory, not Registry-of-Marriage, which some fellow Singaporean bloggers would have assumed 😀

Despite holding a non-development responsibility in my IT professional job, I still have a soft spot for software programming, and therefore, I have been developing software during my free time, and some of them were showcased in my own blog


The year of 2010, is a new era for me, as I have “progressed” beyond software development, and ventured into Windows Mobile operating system image development, or better known as “ROM cooking”, and greatly helped by the availability of easy-to-use tools.

dZenkinZ © Merlion Leo is my first attempt of the ROM building venture, for HTC HD2 Leo. The primary objective of the effort is to have a customized ROM based on my personal needs, with the emphasis on striking a balance between performance and nice user interface. So you may find that some of the included/excluded features not something you would expect of a “public ROM”. Nevertheless, recognising that this is probably the first Leo ROM that’s based on WWE (WorldWide Edition, i.e. English ROM) with Simplified Chinese display & input support, I have decided to share my work with you so that this provides an alternative to rest of the ROMS out in xda-developers.

And why Merlion as the name of my ROM? Since this is possibly the first made-in-Singapore Leo ROM, and Merlion is a well recognised icon for Singapore, I thought why not? It surely beats using some other geeky or cheesy name, isn’t it?

If you like to use my ROM, you can head over to xda-developers for the download link and discussion.

Custom ROM Upgrade for Dummies

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DummiesIn my previous blog entry, I talked about why HTC Touch HD needs to have custom ROM flashed to maximise its full potential.

Unfortunately, the procedure to flash a custom ROM can be a nervy experience, even for an IT-trained individual. While  the actual flashing process will take no more than 10 minutes, one might get lost just by reading through the documentation of the procedure.

So here’s an attempt to do a video blog of the flashing process, to compliment  the detailed documentation created by the developers in xda-developers forum. In this video blog, I’ll be flashing custom ROM using USPL, instead of Hard-SPL method. Read here to know more about USPL versus Hard-SPL. For me, USPL is the least intrusive method, and I can flash stock ROM to my device anytime straight away without any additional procedure.

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