[comp.sys.mac] 512ke keyboard woes

gjohn@Neon.Stanford.EDU (George H. John) (03/20/90)

I'm new to mac using (I don't know an INIT from an FKEY) and I was
wondering if anyone out there has experienced the following
problem with the mac 512ke.

When I run a certain application, it works fine until i press a
key on the keyboard (ie, the mouse can select things, etc).  But
when i touch a key, I get the old "sorry, a system error.." and
"ID=2".  The program (which is a game called AdvInt, downloaded
from sumex -- I don't really care about the game all that much,
I'm just wondering why...) works fine on a regular mac.  

In addition, when I run the application and then exit with the mouse,
everything I type appears on the screen as the little box character.
I have to reboot to be able to type again.

what's up?

thanks.

Michael.Burton@p3.f200.n226.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Burton) (03/25/90)

   George H. John writes about a problem with his Mac 512KE:
> When I run a certain application, it works fine until i press a
> key on the keyboard (ie, the mouse can select things, etc).  But
> when i touch a key, I get the old "sorry, a system error.." and
> "ID=2".  The program (which is a game called AdvInt, downloaded
> from sumex -- I don't really care about the game all that much,
> I'm just wondering why...) works fine on a regular mac.  
> 
> In addition, when I run the application and then exit with the mouse,
> everything I type appears on the screen as the little box character.
> I have to reboot to be able to type again.
   
   I suspect that the program was written with a 1-Meg or larger Mac
in mind.  When running on your 512-K machine, it runs out of memory at
some point, but never bothers to check whether any of its memory
requests have failed.
   This type of behavior can lead to almost anything, including
writes to random areas of memory.  The game may have trashed data
structures used by the Font Manager, which could account for your
problems after you quit the game.


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