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From: grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Graham Thomas)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Tick-tick-tick-CRASH! is not dead in TOS 1.4
Message-ID: <2087@syma.sussex.ac.uk>
Date: 31 Jan 90 15:38:28 GMT
References: <22199@mimsy.umd.edu>
Organization: SPRU, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Lines: 47

From article <22199@mimsy.umd.edu>, by bane@mimsy.umd.edu (John R. Bane):
> The dreaded keyboard-repeat-and-lock crash bug is apparently not gone in TOS
> 1.4.  For those of you who haven't seen it before, what happens is after
> several minutes of fairly steady typing in an editor (I use Word Writer),
> the keyboard suddenly starts slowly retyping the last seven or so keys you
> typed, over and over again.  After about 10 repeats, your program crashes.
> 
This is similar to various bugs which many people have encountered with
First Word Plus.  (No coincidence, probably.  I understand that both
Word Writer and First Word Plus were written by the same outfit - GST in
the UK.)

We used to get the 'repeat then crash' a lot with Wordplus v2.  With UK
version v3.14 we now mostly get a simple freeze - the program just seems
to stop accepting keyboard & mouse input, and the only way out is to
reboot.  GST say it's something inside TOS (or GEMDOS or whatever layer
it might be), so I was rather hoping the problem might go away with TOS
1.4. 

Does anyone have any information on what the problem might be?  It's
frustrating, because there doesn't seem to be any way of replicating the
problem.  People can go for months without it striking, and then have it
happen twice in a day.  (Sunspots??? :-) )

For what it's worth, it hasn't happened to me so often since I installed
Turbo ST (the software blitter, not the acceleration board Turbo 16),
but it has happened a couple of times.  It has happened to a wide range
of people where I work, from techies to novices, from hunt 'n peckers to
touch typists.

Does anyone know of other programs where similar things happen?  I
recall some messages a while ago about WordPerfect hanging, but ours has
been OK.

I'm waiting for the bug to strike while I'm running Wordplus from within
NeoDesk, so I can try sending a few wind_update() calls.  Would this do
any good?

Thanks,

Graham

-- 
Graham Thomas, SPRU, Mantell Building, U of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RF, UK
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