Survey posted 2004-10-12 07:16 by Morgan.

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I tend to download a ton of ASM games, and every now and then, you come across one with a memory leakage problem. My calculator crashes a few time a day. :(

That's why I test every prog I download on my emulator first. ;-)

My TI-84+ SE has yet to crash on me. I don't know if that's strange or not but it hasn't.

You (a) must not have had it very long, and I notice that the older calculators crash more, and you (b) must not have programs that leak tremendous amounts of memory...since the 84+SE has more RAM than the 83+, it would take more leakage to crash.

What do you mean by memory leakage? I understand that term in relation to multitasking systems, but how is memory leakage a problem on the calculator?

Any temporary variables allocated from TI-OS are deleted upon program termination, and most assembly games just handle their own memory anyway.

MWM

Well, with the dynamically allocated memory, at least with my experiences on the 68k Calcs programming in C, will leak memory if not freed on exit.

-W-

Well if it's a memory leak as a result of screwed VAT pointers, then it's almost definitely going to crash *eventually*.

That is true, but, AFAIK, very few games mess with the VAT.

MWM

I meant if it wrote to the wrong address or something due to a bug or bad code.

that's very possible

Umm, the 83+SE, 84+, and 84+SE do have more RAM inside them than the 83+, but they do NOT use that RAM under normal operating conditions. If anything, the increased Archive space would result in LESS RAM being free since every variable in the Archive uses anywhere from 9 to 17 bytes of RAM. (That's assuming users would take advantage of the Archive space that they have.)

Yeah; The extra pages of RAM are not even managed by the TI-OS. Unless your ASM program screws around with things, they never get touched at all. If a program does make use of those extra pages of RAM, then they do so without needing to work within the framework of any other memory map; the "allocated space" in each page is effectively zero before any program runs, and after any program completes execution.

Now, if you write a program that expects data structures that you set up in a previous execution to still be present in future runs, then you may run into difficulties, especially if you have several such programs on your calculator. Has anybody come up with a scheme for managing dynamic allocation of memory in the "extra" pages of RAM? (Sort of a static malloc() sort of thing...)

Those are some disturbing pics of your frapp...

I haven't played calculator games for months. So no crashes since.

I have had trouble with TI-Connect crashing Windows and. giving me the BSOD. It said that a system file (ticalc.sys) was causing a pagefile fault and thus I had to kill the program and the file.

I keep looking at TI's website for the new version that is compatible with SP2, but does anybody know of a 3rd-party program that doesn't use ticalc.sys and uses the silver USB cable to link to a V200?

Solution - don't use SP2. It sucks.

Mine has only crashed once... when my cousin was borrowing it for the ACT.

Oh wait, by 'crashed' to you mean TI-OS messing up, or a third party assembly program messing up?

MWM

probably both

when i read "crash", I think more towards something like having the OS deleted or malfunctioning, but I think this applies to MEM or RAM resets as well.

I've had my 83 SE for almost a year... It's only crashed twice. When it happened, I turned it on, and after 3 seconds it shut off. I had to take out the batteries even, but it came back both times after messing with the batteries.

My other 83 (not plus) has been in use since they introduced it, and it's never crashed as long as I've had it - and I bought it 3 years ago.

My 83+'s rarely crash anymore, really only when I'm testing code, and my 89T only crashes when I try to run a program that doesn't like the Titanium.

I have the same story for me and my TI 83+. And it will almost always happen when I'm testing a program I have made and am already skeptcal about it's abilities of crashing. So I use VTI, excpet that my 83+ ROM that I use for debugging is OS Version 1.03 (>_< ugh!)

I test my hooking app and therefore it needs OS 1.13 or higher and VTI 2.5b5 doesn't work with > 1.12. I just use the flashsim, that's what it's made for anyway. (And you can't load Apps into VTI 2.5b5 anyway.)

That's why Corey Taylor and Rusty Wagner released good old Virtual TI v3.0 Alpha. Try that for your TI-83 Plus.

Half the time that doesn't load the app and the app I'm working on needs RAM files loaded too...