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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
- find and fix that bug.
-
- --Cliff
- ctm@ardi.com
-
-