winseck@drutx.UUCP (WinseckM) (04/14/87)
Well I believe I have found a real interaction problem between GEMBOOT and another program, namely the ZOOMRACKS database. I have a 1 meg system with the SUPRA 20 meg hard drive. ZOOMRACKS is on the hard disk (I have found that this doesn't matter-problem still exists when its on a floppy and GEMBOOT is active on the HD. THE PROBLEM: with GEMBOOT installed in my AUTO directory on the hard disk, and ZOOMRACKS in a partition C sub-directory I try to execute ZR. (This is ZOOMRACKS II, but I doubt it matters). All I get is 3 bombs (sometimes 6) and the system goes through reset. Well this looked suspiciously like a problem I had with ZOOMRACKS and the BARREL printer spooler. It seems that ZR is not a well behaved GEM program. It uses parts of RAM without checking whether it's being used by anyone else! I suspect that GEMBOOT now expands into this RAM area (as the printer buffers in BARREL) and results in ZOOMRACKS crashing. I checked this out with someone at QUICKVIEW (ZOOMRACKS) and he confirmed that ZR is not well behaved. He stated that he hoped to fix it in the next 3-4 months. I believe that this has been a problem for a while. I really like the ZR database program but now I can't use it while protecting the integrity of my hard disk. If I don't have GEMBOOT in my AUTO directory ZR works fine. I retried executing ZR without GEMBOOT and all is well. Fortunately I still have only 33 directories on my HD. I hope both applications programmers (like ZOOMRACKS) and system programmers (like ATARI or DRI) stop taking short cuts on this fine machine (the ST) or its going to get a bad name fast. I really hope both the HD 40 folder limit problem and the ZOOMRACKS memory allocation problem are fixed soon. Mike Winseck ..!inhp4!drutx!winseck AT&T - Denver, CO. 303-538-3847