niel@ihwpt.UUCP (M. N. Ransom) (02/22/86)
As I plan to get the ROM upgrade done to my mac, I (like many of you) have been wondering whether my old software will work. To find out, I trotted down to my friendly Apple dealer and tried out a few of my programs on their mac+. As near as I could tell, Word, Excel, Pagemaker, and MacDraft work fine. The only exception I found was Back to Basics (by Peachtree). For some strange reason, certain data gets misplaced on the screen. For example, in making a journal entry, the account name (which the program automatically writes after you enter the account number) gets printed on the line below the one on which it's being entered. It seems to be a display problem only--the information gets registered to the accounts correctly. I seem to remember someone saying that there are some changes to the details of the screen buffer (other than it being moved to the top of 1 megabyte), though I know nothing personally about this (something about alternate screen buffers). In fairness to the mac+, Back to Basics seems to be a buggy program anyway, though I have never seen this particular problem before. My copy is version 1.0, and there may be later versions of the program available (I guess I'll be trying to find out). Still, this indicates that there may be incompatibilities between commercial software and the new ROMs. Niel Ransom