Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/11/10/09:46:35
I've been experimenting with my config.sys file and it seems that my
virtual disk drive VDISK.SYS is the culprit. If I do not load it,
the grabber just works fine. Stranger even, I remarked that i still used
my old HIMEM.SYS in conjunction with the new Caldara VDISK.SYS. I then
tried to use Caldara's EMM386.EXE instead of HIMEM.SYS, together with
VDISK.SYS, and wonder upon wonder, it worked :). I then remembered that I
used to use the old dos RAMDRIVE.SYS in conjunction with Caldara's
EMM386.EXE I got other strange problems like the sound not working in
Allegro programs. I think the conclusion is simple:
If you use Caldara's VDISK.SYS, you MUST use EMM386.EXE, with dpmi
disabled (I always do that.), while if you are using M$ RAMDRIVE.SYS,
you MUST use the old msdos memory managers. *!$% microsoft and their
buggy programs :>. This is really one to remember for all Opendos users...
What is causing the crash however seems to be a bit of a mystery...
On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Shawn Hargreaves wrote:
>
> 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!
My guess is that the VDISK.SYS gets called whenever my CWSDPMI swap file
is accessed, because i put it on there. The grabber somehow triggers a
conflict between himem.sys and vdisk.sys when i try to save, the whole
VDISK.SYS crashes and the swapped out data is gone because it was on the
virtual disk, CWSDPMI tries to get it from there, but the virtual disk has
nuked already, so... finito.
>
> 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 might do this... Sometime... Honest... ;) .
> Most people have problems beause of the sound or video autodetection:
> you can combat such troubles by setting up an allegro.cfg file.
In my case it was system configuration. Another item for the
Allegro.help 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.
>
Right on!
> I'd be tempted to try running it under straight DOS instead. The
> OpenDOS DPMI server is not IMHO the most reliable one around...
Apart from the fact that I always have to disable the DPMI server of
Caldera in my config.sys, I would't want to return to msdos anymore.
In fact, I'm just using Opendos until Freedos gets safe to use on larger
hard disks. Thanks for your help.
>
>
> Shawn Hargreaves.
>
>
>
Bjorn De Meyer.
IA #i^4
Homepage: http://studwww.rug.ac.be/~bgdmeyer
E-mail: bjorn DOT demeyer AT rug DOT ac DOT be
Licentiate Chemistry.
Coordinator of the "Tales of Artah: First Sword" CRPG project.
"I've shaven. I'm happy. I have no religion. Don't pray for me."
Illusion of Gaia 2
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