Date:         Tue, 21 Jul 92 09:57:27 EDT
From:         "Paul J. Bodin" <pjb3@CUNIXB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: NB4 Lockup
Comments: To: Nota Bene List <NOTABENE%TAUNIVM.BITNET@ricevm1.rice.edu>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.notabene

Bill Watts writes:

> In response to Paul Bodin's request for more information,
> I can confirm what someone said earlier, that NB4 is particularly
> prone to crash during printing operations.  Twice it has crashed
> when I have tried to print a range of pages in a longer (30 page)
> document.  But I have also had it crash on other occasions.  One
> time it crashed when I was going through the menu to set the point
> size, another time when I was trying to move a defined block.  NB3
> has run reliably on this machine for over a year, so I do not think
> that my problems are hardware related.  I do not have any TSR's on
> the system except PCTools Mirror.

As Dorothy Day notes in the message quoted below, NBI have begun to
re-write the original XyWrite editor, now that they have control over
the code.  That NB3 had no hardware conflicts with your setup does not
mean that NB4 will not.

Some versions of PC Tools Mirror are strangely sensitive to certain
types of file access, and can lock up your machine unexpectedly or
cause memory conflicts.  Both the use of the help system and printing
involve access to or creation of files in the background where you
don't normally see it, and these are points where conflicts with
Mirror might be manifest.  Could you try disabling Mirror temporarily
and see whether the lockups still occur?

and Dorothy Day adds:

> I've had a few problems with printing in Lingua also, and NBI is working
> on them. These are new problems, and did not occur with the March beta
> version, and did not even occur in the latest NB4 until the Lingua
> disks arrive, belatedly, and I installed that module. So some bugs
> crept in while fixing other things. Anyone who has ever talked to a
> (reasonably small) software developer (the big ones will never admit
> to such things) knows that this is the way things go--tinker with one
> feature, and something else is affected, not always the way you
> wanted... At least with this version NBI is writing some of the code
> is more modular languages than the original assembly language (I see
> signs of Turbo C++ in some program files), so future updates will be
> more manageable than the lumbering assembly progenitor.
> ... [deleted]
> I am beginning to suspect that on the rare occasion when QEMM or
> Windows 3.1 gives me one of those enlightening error messages, it's
> because I have BOTH NB4 and NB 3.1 loaded and running, and there's
> some confusion when the wrong overlay file is accessed by the "other"
> version. I don't have SHARE running, but QEMM and Windows seem to keep
> track of "protection violations" just as well. Serves me right for
> trying to have two versions of the same program running at the same
> time...

It is possible that accessing the wrong overlay file with the same
name can cause problems, especially if you have the old NB directory
in your path before the new NB directory.  Unfortunately SHARE would
not help in this case, since it only locks files that are in use
already.

Remember that the exceptions and memory violations you experience are
events that occur in RAM, usually when a program tries to access a
memory area that either does not exist, or is allocated to the system
or to another program.  The most likely source of these violations in
Lingua (apart from the Orbis beta, which is still buggy) is the video
management part of the program, particularly its font management.
This is all new code, and writes directly to video memory.  One thing
you might want to try if you continue to encounter exceptions is to
use Lingua with the /B switch (use the command NB /B instead of just
NB).  This will cause Lingua to use BIOS calls to manage video instead
of direct video memory access, which is a little slower but much safer
if you have addressing conflicts.  I don't notice the slow down on my
machine, but I do notice increased stability (I'm running under OS/2
which gets thoroughly upset by NB4's direct video access methods).

___________________________________________________________________________
Paul J. Bodin                         Internet: pjb3@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu
Union Theological Seminary               smail: 435-52nd Street
(718) 439-3549                                  Brooklyn, NY 11220
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU