Zoofari made the VP101 board cheaper by replacing the high-performance VR5500 with a slower TX4925 SoC and then they reprogrammed the FPGA so nearly everything else was done differently. But once we found out what they'd done it wasn't so bad.
No, I don't know why it says the partition info is bad, it seems to go ahead and load the program fine anyway. (ETA: Smit's original PCB gives the same message about bad partition info).