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From: lpm@lanl.ARPA (Lauren McGavran)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: pc graphics packages (HALO)
Message-ID: <576@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 17-Mar-86 13:28:12 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.576
Posted: Mon Mar 17 13:28:12 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Mar-86 03:30:03 EST
References: <2939@sunybcs.UUCP>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 44

Steve Levine writes of problems with HALO;  I have had rather marginal
performance from this package, too.  Steve's complaints are
	1. It links too slowly,
	2. in large model, it does not seem to work as advertised, and
	3. the interface and documentation are lousy.

I would agree it links slowly, but with Microsoft's latest linker and
an Iomega Bernoulli system the link time is tolerable.  It is just a
huge library.

I, too, am having really bad problems with the large model (Microsoft,
not Lattice C); I have spent a couple of weeks trying to isolate the
problem and make absolutely certain that my code is clean.  All the
evidence points to a pointer getting a segment of zero; I suspect the
authors have been careless with pointer declarations.

Version 2.25 comes with a really nice manual, and I have not found
any functions that do not perform as stated, when they work at all.
And usually they work; they have always worked for me in small model
programs.

I have talked to a couple of technical people at Media Cybernetics (the
ones who wrote HALO), and they have always been pleasant.  The answer I
always seem to get is, "Oh, that's an old version.  Let us send you the
latest and see if it fixes the problem."  I just received 2.25 and am
going to see if it really did fix the problem; I doubt if it did.

In summary, Media Cybernetics seems willing to try to help, but I would
still rate HALO as marginal.  I have not had as many problems as Steve
has; until I tried to create files for a pen plotter and drive an EGA,
I thought everything was fine.  Clearly, though, the large model support
is defective.

(Steve - I will try your problem and mail you more details.  But you
should set the device with setdev(file name) where file name is in the
same path that you are running from, or an accessible path (via PATH,
Filepath, etc.), and is of the form haloxxxx.dev)

Lauren McGavran
Computer Research and Applications; MS B265
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, NM 87545
(505)667-8386
FTS 843-8386