OHHHH........ OK. Looks like there is some misunderstanding here from both sides !
I mean... I never meant to say that these extra eggs were coded / created by HPAK nerds. What I meant was that it looks like there are 2 or 3 eggs (or whatever) but I assumed HP at the factory would ship scopes with any one of those eggs, randomly, so the end user would get one of the 3 (if there are 3 in total, whatever). Like, I don't know, HP decided that Week #1 they would flash egg #1 into the scopes/motherboard F/W, then Week #2 they would ship the scopes with egg #2, then Week #3 with egg #3 then go back to egg #1 and cycle like that....
So I thought that HPAK users today would use GPIB to pull the F/W from their scope, figure out where in memory the egg resides, pull it, upload it to their favorite HPAK forum/server, then every one with an HP scope could go download the eggs he does not have in his scope, and reflash his F/W via GPIB to overwrite his egg with another one ?
Like, say your scope came with Tetris, but you would like to have Asteroid. So you go to the HPAK forum, you download the binary blob for Asteroid, and flash that into your scope via GPIB. over writing your Tetris egg.
But... from what you say, do you mean that it's not like that at all... looks like you mean GPIB is not used as a means to flash a new egg into the scope F/W, no sounds like you mean the GPIB module ITSELF contains a ROM that contains an egg ? So if you plug that GPIB module, the scope can either, using different magic key sequences, either display the scopes's own egg, or go get the one that's stored inside the GPIB module ?? Is that it ? Do I get that right now or ??
I guess there are other modules available than just GPIB... does each type of module contain its own egg ? Or was GPIB the only module that had one ?
These 546xx scopes look like a lot of fun... can't wait to receive mine and play with it !!!
Now you have it, sortof.
In my case it was not that I was going to use the GPIB to flash newer FW; it was that
I was hoping the FW with Tetris might be in the GPIB module. IIRC there was also a Plotter controller/Maths module and probably a few others I can't remember.
The short version is this: The eastereggs
(this is a generic nerd term for anything you find that the creator left hidden, or sometimes hidden in plain sight, for the faithful users/viewers to find; also commonly applies to video games and even movies), when they happened, it was because there was unused space in the ROM on a scope or a module that used the interface on the back. Obviously, different scopes have different functionality and different FW, just like the modules.
This means that the "leftovers" the engineers got to play with were not all the same amount of space, so I'm pretty sure that's where the different eastereggs came from. Probably also not the same dev teams, so may actually have been some friendly rivalry to see just what they could cram into a itty-bitty chunk of unused space.
mnem