KAPFFER@DMZRZU71.BITNET (Matthias Kapffer) (05/09/88)
Last week I finally got my new IIgs ROMs (yes, after just waiting *9* month for it !). After a little bit of playing with that new toy I detected the following rather annoying bug: The Routine APPLEII @ $FB60 in the monitor which is supposed to clear the screen and display the cold start message ("Apple IIgs" on the old ones, now complemented by the copyright notice) has several unwanted side effects. Not only that the internal cursor is placed in line 24 instead of 1 as in all prior versions (ok, this one was never documented anywhere) but several jump vectors will be overwritten with a dummy address (for example, $FF65 for $3D0 and $3F5 or $FF/B5DE, which is SEC / RTL, for the following). This affects BELLVECTOR, nearly all IRQ.XY (except IRQ.MICRO obviously) and several others making the CDA menu unreachable. I used to call this routine in the HELLO file of me DOS 3.3 disks and now have to edit them all ! And note that this behaviour is a bug because APPLEII is documented in the Apple IIgs Firmware Refernece Manual as an official one (specified with *no* side effects of course) and therefore should be stable for the rest of the time. If Apple keeps changing the ROMs at this rate the Apple II will soon be more compatible with a vacuum cleaner than the former members of the family !!! Matthias Kapffer <KAPFFER@DMZRZU71.BITNET>