CF freezes on exit - Page 1

Hello! I have a ti-89 titanium, and finally installed CF correctly (manually with tinstall with cfpacks one through seven) with Preos 7.1 and the patched cf\cf. The game works beautifully, except when I press esc to exit, at which point the screen freezes within the game as if it was a screenshot and none of the buttons work. Am I doing something stupid or is there a reason for this problem? Thanks for making such wonderful games!

Try to do ESC+ON...

ESC + ON doesn't work, but taking out a batteries does and resets the calc. But the issue for me is not how to unfreeze the calc. My question is if there is any way to avoid it freezing altogether, so that I don't have to archive all my prgrms b4 each play. By the way, is the save file on CF stored on ram? If not, I would be able to load the game even though it freezes, right?

You can try to do ESC+ON to quit CF (inside the game itself).
CF save files are store in RAM, but you can archive them (In such a case, you can't write it back). I really don't like games which create archived game files.

Why? Automatically archiving the save files is the best way to make sure they aren't lost when the calculator crashes. You should know that crash protections aren't perfect...

there are users who don't want files to be automatically archived, because the fear for their ROM's life
The best solution, IMHO, in to have an option to enable/disable auto-archive

Aren't people paranoid... It's much more likely to drop the calculator into a flush toilet than to use up its Flash cycles any time soon

I'll try it. Thanks for your help!

well... ESC + ON within the game just froze it, so it didn't work. Oh well - I guess I won't be able to get very far I hope this type of thing will be fixed by the next version (if there is one).

Martial Demolins
:

Kevin Kofler
: You should know that crash protections aren't perfect...

In which case could fail the crash protection of preos? Why isn't it perfect?

Crash protections can always fail. They by definition leave the calculator in an unstable state, and thus it can (and most likely will) crash again. And you can get stuck in a loop where the calculator crashes again as soon as the crash protection is done, or even while the crash protection is working. This sort of things does happen with the PreOs crash protection (as with any crash protection on an MMU-less CPU), there are reports of this happening, and there is nothing you can do against it.

The only thing which is safe to do in case of a crash is a reset. All files which should be kept even in the even of a crash must be archived.

Could you send me a dump of your calculator ? (Cf DDump ).

Hmmm. It depends on how DDump works... This crash is unique of anything i have ever experienced before. Other errors I have had have black bars like "Address Error" or simply go into the Apps and say "Crash Avoided" or something. However, this error just immediately freezes the whole thing. Therefore, if the DDump is created as soon as the error occurs and will be there when I reset the calculator, I can do it. I will try it tonight in the hope that you can find out that this problem is because of something easy to fix

I just noticed something interesting: A person below has a similar problem to mine (CF freezes on exit) and I also had a problem with Kirby and the Apps key (except for mine, the calc turned on but the game was frozen). I didn't make much of this and didn't care because as long as the game exits I'm fine. Could there be some similarity in our problems?

I ran DDump on my calculator, so should I just cause the crash and then send the DDump to you? I can't quite understand the readme. You said to do "Cf DDump", does that mean that I have to specify for DDump which program it is going to run for before the crash? I am going to assume that I am just supposed to cause the crash and DDump will do the rest.

Run ddump, and send me the output.

I have sent it

Run it now.

Ok I have the dump. Thanks.

tell me if you find anything useful

Well, nothing to do with CF, but here are some advices:
Try avoid mixing Iceberg and Preos: create a new directory "iceberg" and move iceberg, graphlib, userlib, ziplib, filelib, pk92lib, shrnklib, genlib, gray4lib, gray7lib, hexlib, hufflib, util, ziplib from main folder to this new directory (Or remove Iceberg).
Remove main/intro
Move main/sma to folder sma. DELETE smadata! It is a source of bugs.

I will still look at your dump.

well.....
None of the above things worked for fixing CF. However, deleting smadata (which I had actually used to run sma) was useful, and sma still works. I don't know what that intro thing was, so that was good to delete. I also moved the libs, but I didn't see any effect of that. What else could it possibly be?

At least now I know that my problem wasn't so stupid that you could immediately see what it was

I guess you didn't find anything... oh well.

I don't have much time for TI programming now.