Author Topic: Programs become unstable over time?  (Read 8642 times)

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Offline ACagliano

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Programs become unstable over time?
« on: July 01, 2010, 08:31:20 pm »
I am asking this just to see what the general consensus is amongst you guys. Will, any program, over some time of usage on a system (with or without interference from other programs), eventually become unstable. If so, why?

Offline Deep Toaster

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #1 on: July 01, 2010, 10:27:51 pm »
Probably not, unless you somehow corrupted your ROM and it now spews out random data to random places :(

I've had problems copying ASM programs (using DCS, for example), where some of the hex is replaced by BASIC tokens, and if it's copied enough times, there would be a good chance it could start a crash. I've also had tokens getting replaced randomly by Axe when I tried compiling while the source was in Archive. According to Quigibo, it's a bug that's been fixed since 0.3.0 (I haven't tried the newer versions yet).

Without any outside interference, I don't see how a program could get "unstable", since the only way for that to happen is if its data is corrupted. Besides, "unstable" BASIC programs (seeing the name of the board in which you posted this topic) don't really do much except break and display some arbitrary ERR: message to help you fix the program.

EDIT: Is there something wrong with your calculator, or are you just asking this out of curiosity?
« Last Edit: July 01, 2010, 10:28:39 pm by Deep Thought »




Offline ACagliano

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #2 on: July 01, 2010, 10:53:09 pm »
No, just out of curiousity and slightly out of experience. I have had a few issues with a program that I designed over a year ago, called EMPFORM.8xp. Then, I let a year go by. When I returned to it a year later, it randomly gave me an Err: Domain, that I couldn't pinpoint.

Offline AaroneusTheGreat

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #3 on: July 01, 2010, 11:59:02 pm »
It could be that some of the code was dependent on settings in the calc somehow, like going from radians to degrees with trig functions or something of the sort. I don't know what else would have changed if you did not alter the code and the calc did not receive some interference from another program on it.

Offline ACagliano

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #4 on: July 02, 2010, 02:23:09 am »
No. The program was tested extensively on my calc after I made it. Another program probably interfered. I'm scanning the code, line by line, to figure it out.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #5 on: July 02, 2010, 02:29:13 am »
Some corruption might have occured. It is usually rare, but it can happen. I think it's worse with group files, though. I ungrouped Mana Force 2 to test it a year later once and got an ERR:SYNTAX in the code
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Offline mapar007

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #6 on: July 02, 2010, 06:53:32 am »
Groups are strangely susceptible to corruption. No clue why. I'd like to blame it on TI's crappy code :P

Offline Deep Toaster

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #7 on: July 02, 2010, 07:45:27 am »
How is group data organized, anyway? I read all the way through 28D, but it didn't say anything about it.

Groups are strangely susceptible to corruption. No clue why. I'd like to blame it on TI's crappy code :P

Yeah, I've lost several projects because of a stupid ERR:VERSION. For some reason, groups seemed less stable with MOS installed.




Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #8 on: July 02, 2010, 09:28:05 am »
It used to be much worse with older OSes, though. It happened with about half of the group files.
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Offline mapar007

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #9 on: July 02, 2010, 09:45:38 am »
Err:VERSION is not much of a problem, there exists software like GroupTool that is capable of ungrouping those.

I once had a detailed document about group structure, but I don't know where I found it.

Offline Builderboy

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #10 on: July 02, 2010, 02:18:12 pm »
Be carefull with grouptool, I once had it corrupt an entire group of Serenity progress with token FF

Offline JoeyBelgier

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #11 on: July 02, 2010, 03:51:02 pm »
I don't know if it counts but, back when Calc84Maniac was overloading us with projects and demos, I was one of the persons testing them. I happened to have a newer calc than most of the other people and somehow during the test of one of his games my calc got corrupted. He did give me a few lines of asm( code and my calc worked again, altho slower. As example, Chips Challenges' greyscale flickers a bit and works obviously slower than on other calcs. It wasn't Chip's that corrupted my calc though, can't really remember what that project was.

Damn it has been a long time.

Offline Eeems

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #12 on: July 02, 2010, 04:19:32 pm »
I've actually had a program error on a line that it shouldn't, I then copied the program down onto paper and then re-entered it into my calc and it worked, I compared the two, and there was no change, it just seems that somehow the token was corrupt or something x.x
/e

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #13 on: July 02, 2010, 05:49:59 pm »
Can CalcSys fix ERR:VERSION problems? If so, how?
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Offline Builderboy

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Re: Programs become unstable over time?
« Reply #14 on: July 02, 2010, 08:52:26 pm »
I remember I once had a problem when transfering groups to a calculator, are you tranfering as a group or as a program? Because it might help to ungroup them on your computer if that is the case