IMPORTANT NEWS!! Since Xmas 1994 when Deadlock 7 was released with a major bug which caused it to crash on Amiga 500s with Fast memory there have been a several changes to Deadlock and the group Dimension-X. Firstly, several members of Dimension-X left to form a new group called Narcosis. We (NCS) still have not had any communication with Dimension-X about releasing any future issues of Deadlock, so we can assume that Dimension-X has died until otherwise proved wrong. It was decided to make Deadlock a hard-drive installable mag, so we did it..simple enough! So we tested it on Deadlock 7 and have decided to re- release it. And what a stomping difference! New-Features to DLK #7 HD+ -------------------------- Deadlock now loads file via AmigaDos making it Hard-drive installable. Faster text display (displays text whilst clearing screen - double buffered) Multitasking (well almost.) it is now possible to cycle between intuition screens, when Deadlock is at the front all blitter-activity is disabled to prevent any crashes (more later) You can now QUIT from Deadlock by moving mouse to upper-left of screen and holding down both mouse-buttons - system recovery works 100% A different loader module at on the front end of the magazine By running Deadlock from CLI and adding "hdinstalled" (no quotes) as an argument each article will be read from disk one at a time rather than loading every aticle into memory (default) although if there is not enough memory then article will be read one at a time. Will run directly from Work-Bench..added WB_startup unlike other mags :-) Bugs so far ----------- I have not implement reading arguments from a Workbench startup so if you have tried putting "hdinstalled" in the Deadlock.info file then forget it - this is put down to laziness rather than not knowing how to do it. Addittional to the above..forget it! I finally put the code in for retrieving Tooltypes..now you can use: "MULTISYNC" or "multisync", "HDINSTALLED" or "HDINSTALLED", cause its not case sensitive. If you running a monitor with screen-modes such as Super72 or DoublePal then you may have a few difficulties. Firstly upon load the magazine will reset the screen-mode to standard PAL or NTSC. This is fine but if you decide to flip screens then heres the problem because my screen check routine runs on interrupt...and LoadView() and WaitLOF() do not like interrupts and therefore result in a big crash. Therefore you may have to switch your screen-mode back to standard PAL if you intend you flip screens a lot otherwise you should be fine. Additional Info about above... I have JUST added a new CLI option "MULTISYNC", if selected this will call the LoadView() and WaitLOF() routines..unfortunately, it is not as efficient as the normal cycle routines..but it does the job. I have hit the blitter directly a lot within my Level 3 interrupt server unfortunelay you cannot use OwnBlitter() and DisOwnBlitter() within an interrupt so these have been omitted..now and again a blitter operation external to Deadlock which writes to the screen make look a little strange but it will not cause a major cause..although there is a reserved WORD in the graphicsbase for the bltcon0 which stores the last write to that particular register..I will try playing will that in future. Found a slight-bug, the routine to search all Work-bench arguments has been taken out because it doesn't work..to the point eh? There WAS a bug which caused a recoverable alert, I spent a few days trying to locate this bug, I finally deduced that when you loaded Deadlock, then exitted and run "Avail", a recoverable alert occurred. I put this through a debugger and I tracked it down to the AmigaDos routine which searched for the largest chunk of free-memory..the routine looks through a linked-list and adds up the total amount of memory free. This is compared with the actual amount of free memory , if they are not the same then a recoverable alert occurs. This means that some where in Deadlock there was a routine which was trashing memory. So the best solution was the set up a CLI macro which repeatedly called Avail whilst I stepped through the code with my humble debugger. And low and behold I located the bug.. it was the screen clear routine, clearing slightly more bytes than it should do therefore corrupting memory as the screen buffers are last things in the file. I did previously write in this file that Deadlock crashed after being loading the second time around but because of the above text it does not happen! Wow! Is Deadlock finally bug free? Wait and see! Features removed so far. -------------------------------- Print option used hardware and didnt work on all machines (if any!) Hardware DOS loader, finally bug free we decide to remove it ;-) In the previous Deadlock #7, to allocate memory the memory list in execbase was checked, this has now paved the way for proper memory allocation. All data-files are single-filed, all files remain open, the DOS function Seek() is used to retrieve data from within the files. New features for Deadlock #8 ---------------------------- Lots of music! Yes, from now on we will include 2 or more music modules in every issue in protracker format (or unrippable format if the composer wishes so). Clip-art..for Definate! re-definable palettes..any articles or adverts will requires a particular palette just send it include the pallete in dpaint OR assembler format. print option..accesses PRT: via device drivers which means that it would be possible to print in colour as well is required. Nice proportional font for article headings. AGA graphic adverts section..if we get any responce for AGA graphics then we shall implement this facility upto 256 Colours BUT we will have to still to lowres and medres unfortunately. a nice deadline for adverts and a set release date !! yes folk, the problem with having several editors in different parts of the country is speed, it can slow things down when each editor aquires articles, edits them, adds a little colour to spice them up and then finally send them onto to R-9 who finally puts the mag together i.e create menus, index tables, assemble source to disk. therefore having only one editor means that speed is of the essence. We have also agreed that title screens and music should be complete at least 1 issue earlier. To conclude this paragraph, i will say that because of these changes Deadlock WILL be released on its specified released date articles or no articles. So far the each menu has been treated as an individual article, this will be changed so that the menus are treated as 1 article. So instead of selecting one article forward OR back to go through the menus, you will select one page forward|back. Animated icon will be included in Deadlock 8 as an attempt to give the user interface as face-lift. It will be possible to have a backgound colour (just like that) in any specified colour. The Music screen will be perked up a little bit..wait and see! and thats that Christ I amaze myself sometimes. signed Motive/Narcosis (swapper, coder, group organiser) softeare and hardware used to test Deadlock:- Amiga 1200 Kick3.0 Amiga 500 Plus Amiga 4000/30 + 6meg Fast ram + MultiSync A thankyou goes out to Stu Teale from Denton/Manchester for letting me test this big hunk of code (excuse the pun :-) ) on his 4000 and for his invaluable suggestions. Cheers.