by “Cajun” David Richard
As Technical Support manager here at Ambrosia, I come across my fair share of “bugs.” Fortunately, most of the bugs have already been addressed and taken care of  (such as this month’s most commonly reported bug) or are the results of last night’s Chinese take-out being left out in the sun. 

Being able to handle “bugs” of all sorts with skill and dexterity (and an economy sized bottle of Raid™) helps, considering I live across the street from the mecca of bug breeding grounds, the mighty Genesee river. Plus, being from Louisiana, bugs are an integral part of my culture (fried crickets anyone?). 

I just wish you could use Raid™, or at least a skillet, on some of the bugs that follow.

Most Common bug or A Technical Service Nightmare.
Right after the release of Apeiron, I was driving Andrew to the train station for a well earned vacation. On the way, Andrew says to me: “Oh yeah, if anyone writes in and says that Apeiron is crashing when they quit, have them check their system date, it’s probably wrong.” What this meant was that there was some date specific bug in Apeiron that would cause problems if the date was not in the bounds of the Apeiron High Score Contest. Joy.

So, later that day, I actually had someone call in with the problem. This was not a problem for me, being highly informed of everything. Well, we fixed the bug in version 1.0.1 of Apeiron, and not too many people called with the “crash when you quit” bug. Those that did, I handled with grace and professionalism.

Oh, but we forgot about the “date” specific bug. That date happened to be June 1st, 1995. Well, when that date hit, something else hit the fan. Every copy of Apeiron that was not version 1.0.1 started to crash, and the calls came in. Now, I only have so much grace and professionalism, so if you were one of the folks I was screaming “Upgrade! Upgrade!” to over the phone, please forgive me.

The Apeiron 1.0.0 —>1.0.1 updater is available in all of our forums, and on the Internet. For complete paths, send me an eMail at AmbrosiaSW@aol.com..

Swoop Update on the way!
If you haven’t yet seen our game Swoop, stop reading immediately, and go download it. Go ahead, I’ll wait...

Excellent, here is the bug list as it stands. Many, if not all, of these problems will be fixed in a soon to be released update for Swoop.

• You can hit “N” from the high score screen and start a new game. When you do it, the cursor remains visible, and will leave artifacts from the high score screen in the play area. The work around is to move the cursor to a corner before hitting “N.”

• There is also a cosmetic problem sometimes when exiting from the Music dialog box. The screen becomes askew. This can be fixed by pressing the space bar twice. This may be linked to larger monitors.

• You can crash Swoop by changing the sound (via the number keys) too fast. 

• Swoop has some trouble with multiple monitors. If you have a non-256 color capable monitor as your main screen, Swoop may try to use it. This can be worked around by changing your main monitor to your 256 color capable monitor and restarting.

• If you ever get an error while trying to run Swoop that says something about a “vague” error, try increasing your memory allocation for Swoop to 3,700K (100K higher than normal). This will solve your problem.

• Swoop will also crash at random times if you do not have your machine in 32-bit addressing mode. There is one area of the program that causes problems when in 24-bit mode, and will cause a crash at seemingly random times.

• Double dilemma, if you are simultaneously killed by two Swoopers, you lose two lives. Sure this isn’t all that fair, but if you allow yourself to get into the cross hairs of two Swoopers, you may deserve it. No, actually this was not planned this way, and we are going to fix it.

Well, that’s it so far. If you have anything to add about these bugs, or encounter one that is not listed here, please contact us with as much information about the problem as possible. 

As for the Swoop upgrade, its on the way!

“Cajun” David Richard
Technical Services Manager
Ambrosia Software, Inc.