Re: wolf 3d-- bug? -- the culprit?

[Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>]

Sandy writes ...
> 
> Try Shift boot if you haven't already.  When I did this, all problems that
> I was having disappeared.


     Okay; I tried Shift-booting and it seems to work! After doing the
Shift-boot, I did 4 game starts (Mission 1), played enough to shoot 3
guards each time, and 4 OA-Q quits-- no problem. (Thanks for the idea!)

     Next, all of the Desk Acc's were moved to a TMP folder, the
computer was turned OFF, and, then, restarted normally (i.e. INITs were
loaded).  The game bombed on the 2nd OA-Q exit try.

     Since getting rid of the Desk Accs did no good, it seemed like a
good idea to try getting rid of some INITs (in SYSTEM/System.Startup/).

     My system normally loads in 4 extra INITs: IR, FixFontMgr601,
Hierarchic, and Quick.Launch. With the Desk Accs restored, the game
passed the 4-Starts/play/4-Quits test with all of my INITs loaded except
one.

     The exception was Hierarchic. Since Hierarchic was the second INIT
I tried swapping out and it is a fairly large file (21k), I wondered if,
maybe, the problem was related to just the total kB of INITs loaded.
However, when Hierarchic was the only one of the 4 extra INITs present,
the game bombed.

     Evidently, when Hierarchic is present in SYSTEM/System.Setup/ and
loaded-in during system startup, Wolf-3D bombs about 50% of the time
upon exit.

     Hierarchic is used by Spectrum (at least, by Spectrum 1.0). If you
try to load Spectum and Hierarchic has not been loaded, you get a prompt
asking where to find Hierarchic and a display of the current folder
contents (i.e. the SPECTRUM/ folder. If Hierarchic is moved from
SYSTEM/System.Setup/ to the folder, you can avoid having it load in
during startup and it is not too much bother to just click it when you
run Spectrum and get the prompt.


     One thing which may be of interest to bug hunters is what happens
when Hierarchic is not loaded at startup and is loaded when running
Spectrum. When Spectrum is exited and you play Wolf-3D, you do not
appear to get bombs when exiting (if you do, they are less frequent);
BUT, I did get one crash (out of 3 tries) when _starting_ Wolf-3D! 

     
 
Rubywand