• See what's going on behind the scenes at Bimmerlabs - completed and published major changes will show up here. Of course, we are always working on other updates that are invisible to the user.

    #69 Download customized files as binary - plus other improvments v0.8.96 2018-08-14

    This is a rather small, but still useful update - now customized files can be downloaded in binary format, which should make tuning cycles faster. Often, I don't keep a copy of a file on my machine, because I work on different computers, and it's stored on Bimmerlabs anyway. But if I want to revise something I have to manually run it through the 0da converter first. Now it will be available right in your project downloads!

    Stock files can already be downloaded in binary format, but I have made a small improvement there as well. To save space in the 0da files, BMW left out areas of memory that are essentially blank, or 'NULL'. But the value of a null byte varies depending on the CPU architecture - for many, it's simply 'FF', but other DMEs use '00' or 'A5' Previously Bimmerlabs would check to see if the null byte is already known (from our database). If that fails, it defaulted to 'FF' because there was no better assumption. Now, it will check for $VALUE_UNUSED_BYTE in the 0da, and if it exists, it will use that.

    Of course, not all daten files have a defined $VALUE_UNUSED_BYTE, so in those cases if it's not known by Bimmerlabs it still defaults to FF. However, we will continue to add new DMEs to our database and eventually they will all be defined (since BMW is no longer adding new DMEs to the daten files, having moved on to a newer system).

    There are several other improvements we're working on for the next versions:


    • A modified file's CVN (basically the checksum) will be made to match the original tune's CVN - this way it will pass inspections where an emissions station is able to check that the CVN matches one from their database. This can make tunes undetectable, unless they were to inspect the hex data itself which is unlikely.

    • Automatic AIF updates for some DMEs - to avoid a common (albeit harmless) 2FA3 error. This may wait until our standalone flash tool is available, since we don't want to use up all the AIF slots for no reason.

    • Updated UI - I want to add a lot more features, but the current design will get cluttered really fast, especially on smaller screens. I want to reorganize the navigation layout a bit to make future additions seamless


    Of course there is way more planned, and with luck we will have most major features in place by the end of the year - hopefully Beta 1.0.00! :)