htc sense roms, and emulation.

[Gangrif]

I'm poking around looking for a rom replacement for my Incredible. I've found a number of what look like excellent roms here, but i'd love to be able to try them out before installing one of them on my phone.

I have the Android SDK, and it looks like you can emulate an android device pretty easily, I was wondering if i might be able to emulate one of these custom roms on the SDK's emulator? I've found howto's on how to create a vm, and boot it up, even information about how to put a non-standard rom in there, but when i boot the vm, it doesn't seem to load the non-standard rom, just stock android.

Thanks.

[Gangrif]

I ran across another forum which talked about building a system.img out of a compressed archive of the custom rom. I attempted taking the downloaded zip of one of the roms i'm toying with, and renaming it to system.img, and placing it in ~/.android/avd/vmname.avd/

This just hangs my vm at boot...

[Gangrif]

Tried re-packing a system.img using something similar to this (linux):

[user@host tmp]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=./system.ext2 bs=1024 count=200000
200000+0 records in
200000+0 records out
204800000 bytes (205 MB) copied, 0.572919 s, 357 MB/s
[lagern@lagermeister tmp]$ ls -lh
total 198M
-rw-r--r--  1 lagern lagern 2.7M Feb 28  2008 boot.img
drwx------  3 lagern lagern 4.0K Mar 12 14:37 META-INF
drwx------ 12 lagern lagern 4.0K Mar 12 14:37 system
-rw-rw-r--  1 lagern lagern 196M Mar 30 10:20 system.ext2
[user@host tmp]$ mkfs.ext2 ./system.ext2 
mke2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
./system.ext2 is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=1024 (log=0)
Fragment size=1024 (log=0)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
50000 inodes, 200000 blocks
10000 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=1
Maximum filesystem blocks=67371008
25 block groups
8192 blocks per group, 8192 fragments per group
2000 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
    8193, 24577, 40961, 57345, 73729

Writing inode tables: done                            
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 30 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.
[user@host tmp]$ sudo mount -o loop system.ext2 /mnt/tmp/
[user@host tmp]$ cp -rp META-INF/ system /mnt/tmp/
[user@host tmp]$ sudo mkfs.cramfs /mnt/tmp/ system.img
warning: gids truncated to 8 bits.  (This may be a security concern.)

This created a system.img file, but it also won't boot.
I tried using the boot.img that comes with the rom i'm trying to boot, putting it, and the system.img in ~/.androud/avd/systemname.avd
still wont boot.