me again... finally discovered that in fact it was going into flashing mode happily all along, but I had not managed to get the drivers installed. Managed to get started on that but ran into a problem when Windows 8 refused to continue as it didn't like the drivers in the Rockchip folder. A bit of searching led me to this thread: http://www.arctablet.com/blog/forum/cube-u30gt/usb-driver-for-windows-8/

... in the last post (well, at the moment anyway) there's a link to another driver that worked for me under Win8 and I've now run the update successfully. Sadly it's stuck on the ARNOVA boot page at the moment, so I have to troubleshoot that... 

Hi. 

Yes, it works quite well in fact, I am using it full-time. It's noticeably slicker, smoother and more stable than the rooted ICS (not the rather limited stock) I was using. The power cable is required to boot, every time, but I've found that's really not a problem since this ROM literally never crashes and reboots the way the previous one did, several times a day in my case. So you can reboot it if/when you want to while charging - I find in general Android needs a restart every few days to clean out the cobwebs - but you don't need to worry about not being able to start it up again unless you find a particular app that crashes it; I haven't, but then I don't use it for games or anything. It was suggested earlier in the thread that there's a way to fix it with a bit of a hack, but I haven't bothered as it also apparently slowed the tablet down; not worth the trade in my opinion. 

The only problem I've found is that the stock Chrome that comes on it cannot be updated, or rather if I update it, it force closes as soon as I try to use it for anything, so I've reverted to the version that is baked into the ROM, which is OK but not current. I update it, optimistically, every time I notice there's a new version, but so far none of them have worked. 

I'd also like to see an updated version of this, as it was billed as a bit of a first draft, but in my experience it is stable enough for daily use, and an improvement in almost every way over ICS.