Hi, sorry this is a bit long..
I've just discovered something.. (this is a good time to point out
you've know this for years :) )
Just got the latest AF and looked at the web section using V. (2.96NC)
As soon as it got past the introductory page it totally bombed out the
machine, pretty colours, flashy led instant reset, y'know how it goes.
Now, I've seen this on a number of other sites on occasion, and since
there's no warning it can be a pain having the machine just reset for
no good reason. I set about finding out which of the many patches I
run was causing the problem. After much mucking about and rebooting I
decided none of the patches was the culprit - V works fine if I reduce
the screen depth to about 3 or 4. ie: V was running out of chipram.
(We knew this already didn't we?) Now, I'd like a graphics card, but
I've got aga and its ok as far as it goes..
The offending items causing this problem are the huge 850x1200 gifs
being used as backdrop pics. Thats about 1Mb when used at 8-bit per
pixel. Although V seems to stuff its pics in fastram eventually, it
seems to decode or dither them in chipram, and is running out of it :(
Ok, I'll get round to the point now.. I run FBlit (anyone else here?)
because it does speed things up, but also means that I can have a WB
backdrop pic and newicons etc without eating up 1.5Mb chipram. The
author of this patch is quite open that its potentially a very nasty
hack and lists some programs he feels may not work, one of which has
always been the task "V", although some other Voyager tasks are ok.
Being the curious type, I tried enabling Fblit for the task V and
found that it totally solves the running out of chipram problem, and
speeds up image decoding and layout *enormously*! :-)
I'm using the latest V3.40 beta release of FBlit, which is a
potentially buggy interim version. I've tried it for about half an
hour and nothing apparently falls over. Considering the fact the
author is not too happy about the V task, I don't reccommend you try
this unless you have the above problem and feel confident about dodgy
patches. OTOH, V suddenly becomes a lot nicer to use :)
I hope this is sorted in V�, since running out of ram should display
an error not bomb out the machine, although I can appreciate the
complexities involved when downloading multiple images.
FBlit can be found at www.tpec.u-net.com, and you should download the
earlier version(s) and read the docs before diving in with V3.40...
Good luck,
Regards,
Ian
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