#Animator Pro MP faults
8 messages in this thread
Craig,
I have tried the following setup: no mouse or tablet, no vesa drivers or
any other drivers besides DOS 5.0 VGA driver, erase AA.CFG before running
Animator Pro, run in the default 320x200x256 resolution wiht Animator Pro's
"vanilla" driver. Running CLOCK (it is 320×200), I had several different
results each time I tried, but all bad. There were a couple of Memory
Protection Faults before I even saw Animator Pro's first screen (AA.CFG did
not get created.) The best time, the CLOCK ran 94 revolutions before I got
a Memory PRotection Fault. Other times, I got a Phar Lap error, or running
about 25 revolutions before the memory protection fault.
Clearly, this is not a good picture. Is there any information to be had
from the data that is given when these faults occur – such as an indication
about what Animator Pro might be trying to do when it goes down?
If I need to go back to my dealer(s), do you know what their obligation to
me is, particularly the Animator Pro dealer? My system dealer is
reasonably cooperative and supportive, but the Animator Pro guy almost said
directly that he did not want to support the product. I (foolishly) bought
from him anyway since he had the best price, and I thought the product had
a good reputation (never again!).
Best regards,
June
June,
I know very little about all this but one thought keeps popping up as I
read your continuing saga: You appear to be using one fli file for
testing: have you tried OTHER fli's? Do they ALL crash the same way?
Alec Jason
Alec, I would be very happy if it were only the one FLI file that caused
the failure. Unfortunately, they all do. In fact, I rarely can run
Animator Pro doing anything, drawing or whatever, for more than 10 minutes.
I was sticking with the one file to get a consistent test situation, and
besides was interesting to use Clock as a timer to see how long it would
run. June
June:
Well, I don't think it's the software unless you have a bad file, which is
certainly possible. There is no DOS VGA driver per se, BTW. A driver is
software that is loaded to allow special features of a graphics card to
work with a software package. A true VGA card doesn't need a driver to
function as a VGA card. Since you aren't crashing in the same place I don't
think you have a bad file… and I'm starting to think that there is either
a bug in the memory chips, mother board, or in the hard disk. I don't think
any other software that you are using (of those you mentioned) hits your
computer with quite the level of demands that AniPro does…
Your next course of action, assuming you can get this to happen with other
movies besides the clock movie, is to fill out an official bug report and
send it in to Autodesk. You will probably get a better response from them
than you will from your dealers. You should write a complete report
including the information that you have posted here on the forum. Then, if
they say 'we don't know why this is happening' and offer to replace your
disks you can pretty much assume if the problem continues it is the
hardware.
Sorry, but I don't know enough about the internals of AniPro to give you
more specific advice… but no, those messages, from my experience, aren't
pointed enough to select a specific area to look at. Memory in Dos extended
systems consists of chips and your hard disk. If nothing is getting
inbetween AniPro and those two components, then it has to be one of them or
the software. I happen to have Wing Commander II. It crashes from time to
time and Orion attributes that to 'bad disks' from them. I don't know, I
never worried about it enough to get up the effort to send the disks back.
The Yost Group is heavy into 'finals' on some of their software, so maybe
you should try a bug report to get things started in the proper channels.
The same process applies… eliminate one source at a time.
C#
Craig,
I will certainly take your advice and start going the formal Bug Report
route. It most likely will a few weeks before anything comes of that, so
it the meantime, please know that I really appreciate your support, and
that of the others who responded to my cries for help. Sometimes it's
tough to see whether I've tried everything I could or should, and there
still might be something else I could do, but I certainly feel more
confident about where to go next.
Thank you very very much. I will let you know how this gets resolved.
Best regards,
June
June,
I just tuned in at the end of this thread; but it sounds like you & Mr.
Sharp have tried almost everything. Too bad you're getting frustrated in
running Animator Pro. It's really a worthwhile program, and it'd be great
if you could become an end-user rather than a systems analyst.
I can only offer 2 suggestions (Mr. Sharp may well have already commented on
them).
1) If you've got a STACKS=0,0 statement in your config.sys
file, remove it, reboot, and try AAPRO again.
2) If you've got an older 386-16, 20, or 25, you may have an
early Intel 80386 "B Step" chip which could lock up
a system while executing coprocessor instructions.
Your dealer should have a diagnostic program for checking the chip (there
may even be a copy of it in one of the LIBs here).
Best of luck – these are longshots.
Regards,
Terry
June, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but recently we had a demo
486/33 computer in our office and it presented many of the systems you
describe;
Totally irratic behaviour running AAPRO, mainly memory protection
faults.
In fact, the machine was very irratic running *ANY* protected mode
programs, such as AutoCAD, 3D Studio, etc.
The manufacturer would swear up and down that they tested everything on the
motherboard design, but luckily for us this machine was only demo, and we
hadn't yet committed to paying for it. We tried a second identical
machine, with exactly the same types of results.
After some time, the dealer replaced it with a more recent model of the
machine (updated bios, etc.) and the new machine hasn't even so much as
coughed since we started it up with all the identical protected mode
software.
I noticed that in the hardware setup utility in the newer machine, a wait
state had been added, indicating that the original design simply couldn't
handle protected mode memory situations very well.
I hate to suggest it, but you may end up finding out how cooperative your
hardware vendor really is. In other words….it's probably hardware, not
software!
-Jeff
Try this statement in your animator pro directory, usually (c:\ani):
cfig386 ani -extlow 1800000h -exthigh FFFFFFFFh
What this does is tells the phar lap in you ani.exe file to start using
extended memory at the 1.8Mb area up to 4Gb. This MAY put aapro above the
problem area (the first meg or so) where all that weird stuff resides. I
had a simiar problem to you, only with 3d-Studio which also uses phar-lap
and that statement seemed to fix it. If it doesn't you can go back to the
default config by typing:
cfig386 ani -extlow 1000000h -exthigh FFFFFFFFh
Of course make sure you have the cfig386.exe in your ani directory. Good
luck. (I'm no stranger to memory errors myself!)