Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!ucbvax!sdcsvax!jww From: jww@sdcsvax.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: SE with Dark Castle & SmartAlarms Message-ID: <2927@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU> Date: Mon, 30-Mar-87 12:07:47 EST Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.2927 Posted: Mon Mar 30 12:07:47 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 31-Mar-87 06:30:20 EST References: <2911@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU> <2841@well.UUCP> Organization: Western Software Technology, Vista, CA Lines: 31 In article <2841@well.UUCP>, dwb@well.UUCP (David W. Berry) writes: > In article <2911@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU> jww@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU (Joel West) writes: > >Somewhere there's a PD program that pre-allocates the alternate screen > >buffer (so it will be there later) BEFORE other programs steal the > >memory. > Unfortunately, the way Dark Castle goes about find out if the > alternate screen buffer is available doesn't take that into > account. Ie., Dark Castle still won't work, even with it > installed. I talked to the folks at Silicon Beach over the weekend, and, David is right, Dark Castles can't tell if you save the buffer for it. (I was trying to do just that, and couldn't get it to work.) Actually, this brings up a minor complaint of mine. Apple starting encouraging people to allocate space from BufPtr because the system heap is too small. This is a terrible hack; there is no management of this memory, no way to tell why it is allocated or to deallocate it -- or even a bit to say that the alternate buffers are reserved. Now that the system heap is larger on the Mac II, and it will break all the programs that idiotically made assumptions about the value of ApplZone, maybe the system heap can be expanded on the other machines as well. Or maybe we can get some memory management for the BufPtr area (such as a linked list of allocated areas and a trap to move down BufPtr). I mean, this is no better than the hack used to run DA's on the IBM PC! -- Joel West {ucbvax,ihnp4}!sdcsvax!jww (ihnp4!gould9!joel once I fix news) jww@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu if you must