dap1 (11/20/82)
#N:ihlpb:17100001: 0:2421 ihlpb!dap1 Nov 18 12:40:00 1982 Has anybody else had the following problems with the IBM-PC or know what to do about them? 1. DEBUG occasionally jumps to never-never land (i.e., f000:0fea or some such ridiculous address) during perfectly innocent tracing? In my experience, this usually hangs up the IBM and the only way to get out is to restart the machine. I have examples where it seems to happen consistently in the same place and other examples where it happens one time at a particular address and the next time everything goes smoothly. It might therefore be some sort of problem with DEBUG messing up the timer interrupt (maybe even the refresh, hence the hangup). I ALWAYS have this problem when trying to trace BASIC and so haven't been able to debug assembly language programs called by BASIC (as suggested in the BASIC manual). 2. The color resolution on a composite color monitor. On mine (and several others I have seen) various colored text attains various degrees of illegibility with various background colors. I have noticed that if vertical lines are drawn on every other even coordinate I end up with a solid block of red and odd coordinates give a solid block of blue (or vice verce, I don't remember which). I have heard that IBM is trying to support this by claiming that composite monitors don't have the resolution necessary but I don't buy that. For one thing, the APPLE achieves the same resolution without the effect. For another thing, you CAN draw a white vertical line under high resolution so the monitor should be capable of the same act under med. res. Finally, if such a problem were due to the monitor, I would expect it to happen row by row (because of interleaving of rows). I don't see how such a resolution problem could cause column by column errors. 3. The PASCAL compiler apparently allocates disk blocks and then doesn't free them on the source file disk when it encounters errors. I had several problems with a rather large PASCAL program and suddenly the disk was "out of space". I had to do a chkdsk to get the space back. 4. Double word types don't accept any values larger than 65536 (i.e., the example in the assembler manual doesn't work). You get a "division overflow" error during the assembly. This is obviously an assembler bug. If anybody has any answers to any of these I would REALLY like to hear from them. Thanks, Darrell Plank BTL-IH ihlpb!dap1