I maintain a Garmin map export of Iceland which is updated daily. But I've had complaints from Windows users about the maps being hard to install, they expect to be able to upload maps from Garmin MapSource.

Unfortunately the only GUI MapSource installers are proprietary and seem to expect you to use cGPSMapper. To work around this other mkgmap exports have a .bat install script. That works, but not very user friendly for the general Windows userbase.

So I've started to write one, it's really basic at the moment but it's coming along:

And it can install maps that are viewable in MapSource later on:

And here's an alpha version for the brave. That package will install a map of Iceland into your MapSource installation.

The installer itself is really simple. It's a stand-alone executable that reads an accompanying .ini file that tells it what to do. Right now the ini file only contains a brief configuration section that support installing one map as well as all the UI strings in the program to make it translatable.

I plan to make it support multiple mapsets (families) and multiple maps within families though. And perhaps if I get far enough with it some mechanism to update the installed maps when prompted.

Basically everyone's who's producing a Garmin map with mkgmap today should be able to generate a simple .ini file and zip it up along with the executable & the maps to support installation on Windows.

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Regarding the MapSource registry format can someone tell me what the hex value here means:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Garmin\MapSource\Families\OSM_ICE]

"ID"=hex:7f,02

does it correspond to the family-id I pass to mkgmap or something else?

And regarding this:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Garmin\MapSource\Families\OSM_ICE\1]

"LOC"="C:\\OSM\\"

"BMAP"="C:\\OSM\\40000001.img"

"TDB"="C:\\OSM\\40000001.tdb"

Can I add more maps under that family by incrementing the \1 key? So OSM_ICE\1, OSM_ICE\2 etc? and are there more keys than LOC/BMAP/TDB and TYP that are used?