earleh@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Earle R. Horton) (06/16/88)
As Jay Freeman reported in this newsqroup, he recently had a problem with an INIT which looked like a bad compiler to him. Since there are so many INITs around, and who knows what they contain, I find the following procedure helpful upon first encountering mysterious program bugs. Seems simple to me, but Jay said I should post it... Make a copy of your "System Tools #1" disk. Put MacsBug in the System Folder. No PD, ShareWare, or Commercial INITs allowed on this disk. When you encounter a mysterious bug that "can't" be your fault, reboot the Mac from the "clean" disk and see if the bug is still there. Although I never succeeded in contacting the author of the suspected INIT, the problem SEEMED to be that part of a patch installed by the INIT file was written in Pascal, which considers register D2 to be a scratch register. If you patch system routines with a high-level language, make sure that the appropriate registers get saved. You might have to write assembly glue to save one register. DO IT. Earle R. Horton, Thayer School of Engineering, Hanover, NH I wouldn't mind dying -- it's that business of having to stay dead that scares the sh*t out of me. -- R. Geis
freeman@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Jay Freeman) (06/18/88)
The solution was indeed simple, but thinking of it evidently wasn't; I didn't! Then again, perhaps *I* am simple. Thanks again .. -- Jay Freeman