Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!lll-lcc!ames!umd5!uvaarpa!mcnc!ncsuvx!jck
From: jck@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (Chuck Kesler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga500 Problem
Message-ID: <1341@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Date: 29 Dec 87 09:09:58 GMT
References: <9633@udenva.cair.du.edu> <20118@linus.UUCP>
Reply-To: jck@ncsuvx.UUCP (Chuck Kesler)
Organization: NCSU Computing Center, Raleigh, NC
Lines: 53
Summary: much better solution

In article <20118@linus.UUCP> sdl@linus.UUCP (Steven D. Litvintchouk) writes:
>In article <9633@udenva.cair.du.edu> news@udenva.cair.du.edu (netnews) writes:
>>   However, when using the 501 expansion, I ran Textcraft and Online! 
>>   simultaneously. Something very strange happened: there were no Icons
>>   visible for Textcraft. When switching screens I could not see the pencil
>>   icon, after I had clicked the Textcraft screen, but I could move the mouse
>>   around and make the pull down menus work, even though no mouse icon was 
>>   visible.
>>   Any theories ?
>This is a well known problem of Textcraft.  Textcraft was an early
>product that was never designed to work well with expansion memory.  I
>used to have to disable expansion RAM on my A1000 to get Textcraft to
>work.  Until Textcraft Plus became available, there were no upgrades
>or bug fixes ever issued for Textcraft.

Neither disabling expansion memory nor even getting TextCraft Plus
would be the simplest/quickest/best solution to this problem, in my 
opinion.  I, too, was in the same situation after adding 2 meg of 
fast mem to my A1000, but I had no desire/money to purchase a new 
word processor (don't do a lot of word processing to begin with, 
so TextCraft is fine).  Here is my solution: 

	1) Get the program FixHunk from Fish Disk #36.
	   This utility does something along the lines of 
	   modifying brain dead executables in such a way that
	   data structures which need to be in CHIP ram are 
	   loaded there instead of FAST ram-- the crux of this 
	   problem involves data structures describing icons 
	   and such being loaded into fast (expansion) mem.
	   Read the doc file included with FixHunk for a complete
	   description of what this program does.  
	2) COPY the TextCraft executable (TextCraft or TextCraft512, 
	   whichever you prefer) to a new file.  For bext results,
	   place this new file on your ram disk.
	3) Run FixHunk on the copy of the TextCraft executable, and 
	   BOOM! you have an executable which should work just fine.
	4) Try running the FixHunked executable.  If it performs to 
	   your satisfaction, replace to original copy of TextCraft
	   with the modified version.

You might run across this problem with other programs, so FixHunk is
is a very useful utility.  I have yet to find a program which could 
not be repaired using this method, which is not saying that this will
*always* solve your problem, but at least it seems to take care of 
*most* problems.  And it is definitely preferable to all this    
"NoFastMemFirstSlowMemLast" business.  

Hope this helps!

-chuck    jck@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu  -or-  chuck@ncsuvm.BITNET

p.s.  If you can't find a copy of FixHunk, let me know, and I will 
      E-mail a copy to you.