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Date: Sun, 22 Oct 95 15:50 MDT
From: ctm@ardi.com (Clifford T. Matthews)
To: executor@nacm.com
Subject: 1.99p4 available + status report
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Hi Folks,
1.99p4 is available the same way 1.99p3 was.
ftp://vorlon.mit.edu/pub/ardi/BleedingEdge has a DOS, Linux and
NEXTSTEP subdirectory, each of which has patches from 1.99p to 1.99p4.
1.99p4 has yet another attempt to fix the flakiness that Executor/DOS
shows under Windows 3.x.
1.99p4 does *not* fix the slow-drive opening bug. It appears that the
bug in question is not related to long filenames, so we will need more
input from people who are seeing the problem. What I'd like anyone
who is plagued by the slow DOS drive opening bug to do is: Open a
drive and after the disk activity has stopped, but while Executor
appears to be doing nothing, type CTRL-BREAK (the BREAK key is the
right most key on the very top row of most American keyboards. It may
be labeled Pause / Break). That *should* produce a "traceback" which
we would very much like e-mailed to us (bugs@ardi.com). We'll then
have to study a few tracebacks before we can make any diagnosis.
In the meantime, 1.99p4 has a new feature "auto-refresh", which
automatically sets refresh to 10 if Executor detects that programs are
writing directly to the screen. The command line option "-info" is
now supported in all versions of Executor, not just E/D. 1.99p4 also
gives warnings in a variety of places, one of which is if Executor
doesn't have an application zone large enough for the program being
run.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Right now, and possibly even when 2.0 ships, Executor
uses Application Zone memory less efficiently than a real Mac, so if
you run Executor and get a warning and the warning says that you need
to run a given program with a certain amount of memory, you should
consider running it with 20% more memory than you are instructed.
Many bug fixes have been added. Some programs that benefit from these
fixes include Quark XPresss, HyperCard, Deliverance, Space Madness
(must turn sound off to run properly), Ultima III (must turn sound off
to run properly), and Konica Picture Show (still has problems). Since
1.99p4 has been released, we've also made some fixes that help out
PageMaker. In addition we fixed a fairly nasty bug that made it more
likely that a program would die if some other program had been run
first (i.e. run the browser, run program A, quit, run program B and B
would be more likely to die the second time than if it had been run
without A having ever been run).
IMPORTANT NOTE 2: Many more games are now playable than ever before.
This is not because we are concentrating on games, per-se, but rather
a side-effect of the fact that games tend to push 32-bit color
quickdraw pretty hard and we have recently found and fixed a bunch or
bugs in our implementation of 32bQD. However, many games will only
work if you turn Pretend Sound on, *and* turn sound off within the
game itself. Whenever you run a program, you should check to see if
there's a way to turn sound off and if there is, turn it off before
doing anything else. If you do that, "Space Madness" will run.
Neato.
We still have 55 major bugs that we want to address before Cotton
leaves on Tuesday. I'm not sure that we'll make our goal, but we're
getting close. We're now looking into the best way for us to start
burning test CD-ROMs. We've decided that 2.0 will be released on a
CD-ROM and that we'll send all of our current customers a copy on
CD-ROM (no shipping charge) rather than force you to pick it up
electronically.
If you are experiencing the slow opening of DOS drives, please use
CTRL-BREAK as described above to get us the information we need to
