Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/11/10/07:30:22
Bjorn De Meyer writes:
> I've encountered a serious problem with the allegro grabber:
> every time I try to save a datafile to disk it crashes with a page
> fault wich is displayed in tiny green letters on top of the grabber
> screen, and then hangs my computer.
Wow, that's a pretty hairy crash! Normally the Allegro signal handler
will return you gracefully to text mode, so this must be either a
DPMI server fault or a recursive exception: not much fun to debug!
If you are able to capture these messages into a file (redirect
stdout and stderr from the grabber into a log file), you might
be able to symify it and find out where the crash is taking place,
although you will need to build a debug version of Allegro before
this will be useful (see the "debugging" section in allegro.txt).
Apart from that, I don't know what to suggest. You can try gradually
taking things out until the problem goes away, or scattering trace
printouts through the code, but it is very hard to debug something
that is locking the machine so solidly.
> I've read other complaints here about the grabber crashing and
> hanging the computer.
Most people have problems beause of the sound or video autodetection:
you can combat such troubles by setting up an allegro.cfg file.
Although of course I can't promise that it is bug free, I would
be very surprised if this is a simple code error rather than
some kind of system/hardware conflict. I've been using the grabber
for a couple of years now, and it has never crashed once, so I
suspect that this problem is specific to your machine.
> I'm using a P100 with 40meg of mem, and a CIRRUS video card
> with 1 meg mem, running caldara opendos,
I'd be tempted to try running it under straight DOS instead. The
OpenDOS DPMI server is not IMHO the most reliable one around...
Shawn Hargreaves.
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