Re: A82: Crashes!!!!!

To: assembly-82@lists.ticalc.org
Subject: Re: A82: Crashes!!!!!
From: "Patrick Davidson" <eeulplek@hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Oct 1997 15:26:35 PDT
Reply-To: assembly-82@lists.ticalc.org

>I, being one of the few people with a link at my school decided to 
>release ASH onto the general public today. Needless to say by the
>end of the first period, 3 people had crashed their calcs and by
>the end of the second, everybody who I gave a copy had crashed their 
>calcs at least once. We need a shell, like zshell, that is virtually 
>uncrashable. 

I don't think you can be sure it's a problem with the shell.  It
could very well be the result of bugs in the games.

>Some of these people crashed their calcs just running the programs 
>without running ash, others did it while doing their physics or math 
>analysis. One friend divided 8/7 and her calc turned off. That is >kind 
of weird. Anyway, we need a shell that is user friendly, I mean
>a shell that is idiot proof. Either the programs should run
>without using the shell, or that it should be impossible to access 
>them outside the shell. When the shell is exited, all the buffers 
>should be cleared and it should be hard as hell to fuck the calc up 
>with a faulty program.

Preventing a faulty program from crashing the calculator is
virtually impossible.  If it writes garbage all over RAM, there's
nothing the shell can do about it.  Clearing buffers would always
be good, if you know where the are and what defaults to load
into them...

>I did release some questionable games, like space invaders (I am not
>sure if it is the right version), tetris (which hasn't been thorougly 
>beta tested), Same Game (which still in its delevomental stages, 
>although is probably very safe), and the pong game I wrote (which is 
>reasonably simple, yet there is countless oppurtunity to crash your 
>calc in asm). The breakout type game that I released also hasn't been 
>thoroughly tested with the 82.

Since I first got Ash 3.0, I only know of one crash.  It occured
after I was playing Zetris 1.0, Spaze Invaders 1.1, and Same Game.  I'm 
not really sure which program was at fault.  I gave it to two
people at my school who had those 3 games as well as my own
game (Orzunoid), and after 2 school days of intense playing,
neither has crashed the calculator.  I am aware of (but unfortunately
I cannot fix) some problems with Orzunoid, but I don't believe
that it will crash the calculator.

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