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From: micro@imada.dk (Claus Pedersen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Phantom
Keywords: AES ??
Message-ID: <751@imada.dk>
Date: 7 May 90 18:00:00 GMT
Organization: Inst for Matematics and Datalogy
Lines: 39

We hear about the Phantom all the time, at first I didn`t believe in
`it`... (for a year or so) and then it stroke me in Tempus.

I were able to have `it` for 3 hours (moving the mouse really speeds
things up).

Ok I were able to quit Tempus, returned to the desktop and every thing 
still were acted very slow (clicking and moving the mouse simultaneously is
kind of tricky...).

But now to the interesting parts, disconnecting the keyboard on my
MEGA (and thereby Reseting the keyboard cpu) did not affect the phantom,
notice that pressing the reset botton on an MEGA does not reset the keyboard
cpu...

More interesting things, starting new GEM programs did not affect the
phantom either...

BUT NOTICE - starting a non GEM program momentally stopped the phantom.
I started BUG - the debugger from the turbo C package, and everything
was as nothing had happened. I looked after suspicious code on the system
vectores (viruses) but I were not able to find anything.
When returning to the desktop the phantom were there again...

Then I killed the phantom, it`s easy - just press CTRL-ALT-DELETE and off
he goes... (or the little botton at the back called RESET).

Where does this leave us ?
  - Not hardware (surely not the keyboard).
  - Not in the TOS (Bug uses Gemdos, Bios, Xbios).
  - Could be in GEM somewhere (I had a drawing program running too -
    so it could not be in the VDI)
  + this leaves us with the AES... 
    - what about the dispatcher (evnt_xx calls) ??

I guess this problem is for the people at Atari to fix...


- Klaus    (micro@imada.dk).