[MiNT] Problem with N.AES after loading many times

[Mario Becroft <mb@tos.pl.net>]

Today in the course of debugging my PC AT keyboard interface I had to
restart N.AES quite a lot of times, since a certain problem showed up each
time the AES was started (and re-initialised the keyboard). I was able to
diagnose and correct the bug in my keyboard interface but at the same time
I noticed a problem with N.AES.

What happened was that after I had exited and restarted N.AES quite a
number of times, maybe 20 times, the next time I started N.AES it would
fail. I have observed two different failure modes.

In the first case N.AES would load apparently in the usual way, but before
the desk accessories were loaded the computer would seem to freeze.
However as soon as I moved the mouse or pressed any keyboard keys a few
more operations would continue before the freeze resumed. Even the cursor
in a virtual console would stop flashing, until I moved the mouse at which
point it would flash for a moment then stop flashing once more. Or in the
case of a GEM program, a window might be opened but the contents not
drawn, and each time I move the mouse or press a key, a bit more of the
window gets drawn. I have never observed such a situation before.

In the second case N.AES would simply crash upon loading, with an address
errror with PC=0. I did notice that the crash must have occured after
N.AES set the system font, since the font on the console was changed to
the one specified in the n_aes.cnf file after N.AES crashed.

After the problem has occured, the only way to get N.AES working again is
to reboot.

I observed the above with N.AES version 1.2.0.

It does not matter much to me since I seldom need to load N.AES so many
times, but I thought it worth mentioning in case it is of other
significance.

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Mario Becroft                * Tariland, New Zealand Atari User Group |
| mb@tos.pl.net                * Atari Hardware Developments            |
| http://www.ak.planet.gen.nz/~mario/ * Atari Serial Mouse Interface    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+