Ah, I see what's happening (was quadra system bloat)

[Martin Baxter]

>> Interested parties might want to see
>> <http://www.harbourtown.co.uk/temp/before_after.html> where I have posted
>> screenshots of the "About this computer" dialog before launching revolution
>> on the quadra and after it has choked because the system ran out of ram.
>----------
>That just proves my point. You cannot use the REV UI on a stock Quadra 630.
>If I use mine for Rev stuff, it'll be because I have hot-rodded the machine,
>or to just run the engine and Geoff's revrtfer.rev stack for reference only.
>
>Best regards,
>Ken N.

Well, yes and no. Personally I think it's worse than that and that the
'after' screenshot shows that revolution is behaving very badly, and if (as
I suspect) the behaviour depicted is typical of 68k mac then my advice
would be 'don't use it in such machines'. To be sure, any 68k mac that
works like mine and has less than 40 megs of ram is unlikely to even be
able to launch revolution, never mind do anything afterwards.

I've concluded that what's happening on the quadra, and I think the
screenshot clearly shows this, is that revolution isn't using its own
application memory partition for documents and data and instead is loading
them into the operating system's memory partition, at any rate that's how
it appears to the mac Finder.
Surely it's not intended to work like that is it ?

It just blithely fills up the system's ram with its stacks and whatever
until there's no more system ram space left and the mac crashes of course.
Possibly, the fact that at the same time there is an unused 17 megs or so
free within rev's application memory partition results in some internal
confusion about whether new ram space can be safely granted to the app, I
don't know, I'm only guessing needless to say.

Do 68k standalones work like this too?

Any rate, I do think the system requirements quoted in the "Read Me First"
file should be revised because they suggest it is possible to run
revolution development environment on a mac with "24M total" ram, correct
me if I'm wrong but this is impossible isn't it?

martin baxter

m a r t i n

martin baxter Cambridge UK