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I'd like to take a moment to clarify a few misconceptions that have
appeared recently on the mail list. No big deal, but it may lead to a
clearer understanding.
>.. I've even had a
>couple of processes crash under MiNT (not MiNT's fault), give their core
>dumps, and MiNT goes on. Nice protected memory...
Not to be picky, but this is NOT protected memory at work. Although the
Atari MiNT has protected memory (only for 68030), MacMiNT does not.
MacMiNT does intercept the bus error vector and will kill a process that
causes a bus error. However any errant memory access that may harm the
MacOS, JET, MINT, or any other structure that is in memory cannot be
detected. In all likelyhood the bus error was caused by a memory access
that was totally outside the range of memory present on the machine.
Because of the whole mmu issue it is unlikely that this will ever be fixed.
>The console is excellent; I really appreciate the new speedup code.
Several people have commented on the speed improvement in the console.
Alas, although I can take credit for this, it is NOT new! Many years ago I
hacked the tty.c code in mint as well as made major changes to the console
of jet in order to speed up the console. At that time Brad felt that my
tty.c changes made MacMiNT depart too far from regular MiNT, so he didn't
want to include it in the distributions. The patch file had been
distributed on the mailing list however. I would like to say that since I
have removed the macfs.c from MiNT, even with my changes to tty.c present,
MacMiNT today is closer to regular MiNT than at any time in the past.
Because all of the source changes use #ifdef MAC (at least those that
shouldn't properly appear in a non-mac MiNT), theoretically a MacMiNT
source will properly compile an Atari ST MiNT. So far as I know, no one
has tested this yet (anybody like to?). It would be nice if the Atari MiNT
accepted our changes so that there was a common source. I will suggest
this on the MiNT mailing list soon.
>Well, I just recalled 'date' problem and found it does have second-jumping
>problem (I downloaded on Oct 18). Q610, 24 Mb real RAM, extensions on, 7.5.3.
If you mean seconds always increase by two (resolution of 2 secs), well,
that's normal MiNT behavior as Bruce Bennett pointed out recently. If you
mean that the seconds go up and down and all over as time marches on, then
well, it surely shouldn't since this bug in JET was fixed - perhaps the
date program has bugs.
>BTW, has anybody else noticed the new nice icon? The bundle bit isn't turned
>on, so it won't show up on desktop.
These icon's were created by Rob Pelky some time ago, I just opted to
include them in my release this time. I have also integrated them into the
source code soon to be uploaded.
h.
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