Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/02/28/01:55:50
Shawn Hargreaves (Shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk) writes:
> Paul Derbyshire writes:
>>I have today discovered two very SEVERE BUGS in ALLEGRO that manifest
>>themselves when the SOUND features are used.
>
> Wow. I have to say, your post leaves an ugly taste in my mouth. Not
> because you are criticising my code (bug reports from users are
> absolutely essential, and I'm normally delighted to be informed of any
> problems that people are having), but because of your unpleasant and
> confrontational attitude. I came very close to consigning your message
> straight to the trash can (I don't like flame wars, so I have a policy
> of not responding to any posts that make me feel personal animosity
> towards the writer), but in the interests of getting these troubles
> fixed, I'm willing to investigate your problems a bit further...
Sorry, I was just a tad ticked that bugs this huge made it to a non-beta.
(If the non-beta's like that, mayhap I should get 2.2beta...:))
>>SEVERE BUG #1: After running an Allegro program that executes a
>>play_sample at some point, then returning to DOS, if you then run another
>>DOS program that uses sound, e.g. the test-sbc program that comes with a
>>creative labs soundblaster, the result is a squawk from the soundcard and
>>a system hang.
>
> This is very probably a bug. I need a bit more info from you, though, in
> particular:
>
> What soundcard do you have? Model, irq number, dma channel, etc...
Model: Regular Sound Blaster. IRQ 2. DMA 1.
> What is your BLASTER environment variable set to?
SET BLASTER = A220 I2 D1
> Which sound driver is Allegro using? (displayed by play.exe)
Sound blaster...
> Does the problem happen if you only use the MIDI sound, or only the
> digital sound, or can either cause it?
It was play_sample. Since I haven't managed to find a single damn piece of
software on the whole wide Internet to compose midi music, I haven't had
opportunity to test the midi functions yet.
> Does the problem occur when you re-run the Allegro program, or only when
> you run other (eg. creative labs) code?
Other code. If I run an Allegro program it's OK. If I run Windows, though
it uses the sound, that's OK. Creative labs code...kaboom. :P It also
happens only intermittently, and I vaguely think it might be only if the
program is aborted unusually, eg by a gpf or such, before exit() is called
or main falls through.
> Are you running under win95, or clean DOS?
Essentially clean DOS: Win 95 with an F8 menu boot "command prompt only",
specifically because the "MS-DOS Mode" seems to have traces of Windows in
the system. LFN support is turned off.
>>SEVERE BUG #2: load_sample always returns NULL, even if the string it is
>>sent as parameter is the fille name of a mono WAV exactly as per
>
> What version of Allegro is this? Up until version 2.2, there were some
> problems with the WAV parser (it only understood a small subset of the
> RIFF format, and didn't like the samples produced by win95 utilities).
> If you have an earlier Allegro version, get 2.2 from my web page and see
> if that clears the trouble up. If you already have 2.2, please send me
> one of the WAV's that you can't read, and I'll investigate further...
I shall check out 2.2...thanks.
>>I cannot imagine that either of these two bugs could have gone completely
>>undiscovered. There is no way you didn't know about these when you
>>released the version of allegro I'm using. Yet the documentation makes no
>
> I can't remember who it was that said "never attribute to malice what
> can be adequately explained by stupidity", but it's a very true
> statement :-) Did it never occur to you that I might actually have
> tested this code, and that the reason I didn't notice these problems was
> that they don't occur on my machine?
Ah. of course, any developer has only a subset of all possible hardware
and software configurations for testing. And your WAV parser must have
been tested only on a sampling of wav files that didn't happen to include
all the possibilities...hm.
--
.*. Where feelings are concerned, answers are rarely simple [GeneDeWeese]
-() < When I go to the theater, I always go straight to the "bag and mix"
`*' bulk candy section...because variety is the spice of life... [me]
Paul Derbyshire ao950 AT freenet DOT carleton DOT ca, http://chat.carleton.ca/~pderbysh
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