ParanoidLittleMan Posted April 23, 2021 Share Posted April 23, 2021 (edited) People use to call 'bug' almost every problematic situation when is talk about computers, SW for them, but I must say that those who design HW, write SW simply can not to think (ahead) on every possible scenario, way of usage and like. What does not mean that should not care about it, yes should as much as possible, and one thing is sure: long term experience helps a lot in it. So, is it bug when some game from 1986 works not well with TOS 1.04 ? Not really. They just could not know that Atari will change some variable addresses - like joystick read. But it is for sure bug what I saw in game Grand Monster Slam (and similar one in another game ... hmm.. can not recall title at moment) - so it fails on STE machines with corrupted screen. And the reason is real bug in code - overshot in part what writes colors in palette - it goes over couple bytes, where is nothing by ST machines, but by STE there is HW register for scroll, and it gets some bad value, what corrupts screen. Seemingly another case of not seeing future, but no, it is just plain error to write above specific area. Very similar error causes crash with 4 MB RAM - and again, plain bug, what activated not during tests just because they did not have 4 MB RAM in their test Ataris (like in 1988) . In other words - accuracy is essential, and being not accurate is like timed bomb - OK, big words, but dramatic effect matters ? Case of Atari STE: should be released earlier - like min 1 year, and it had actually 3 bugs (at least that's what I know) when first versions were released. Well known bad DMA chip problem. Medium resolution desktop.inf bug. And less known one, what I discovered some 12 years ago: Microwire mixer bug - DMA sound volume much lower than PSG sound volume, and impossible to set properly, despite should be possible to change ratio by DOCs... All 3 cases say to me that testing failed, especially in first 2 cases. As there was no SW what used DMA and PSG sound at once mixer bug just did not show - although, they could make some test SW for that ... DMA and med. res. bug were fixed - with new DMA chip version and new TOS version. Mixer bug went into TT and Mega STE. And if you ask: it was just wrong resistor value calculation. Falcon is first where DMA and PSG volume ratio is correct. But we may ask how many customers were lost because ... ? And I did not mention some bad solutions in TOS, which were never corrected - bad year 2K code for IKBD and crash in text mode when should display very large file sizes (10 MB or more) - well, it was just not time of that year, not time of so large files . Such and similar details can make difference between good SW and great SW. Edited April 23, 2021 by ParanoidLittleMan bug 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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