[net.micro.mac] Mac+ Compatibility

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