25 Aug
2006
25 Aug
'06
2:30 p.m.
--- Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
I think what the OP meant was functionally like a
blue screen on an MS
OS, not visually identical to one
Ahh, yes. I have never had the pleasure of
seeing the blue screen on an MS OS, the
computers at work generally freeze up
completely.
On 8/26/06, aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
<aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> --- Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > --- Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > If you attempt a read larger than 8-bits on
an
> >
odd-boundary, the 68000 traps... (Guru
Meditation)
Like a blue screen?
No, a Guru Meditation has a completely black
screen with a rectangle in white/grey at the
top of the screen.
Inside the rectangle is a message a long the
lines of "A fatal software error has occured.
Press mouse button to reset", followed by
2 8 digit (hexidecimal?) numbers.
In any case, the entire screen may or may not be
black, depending on
the nature and severity of the cause - with some
errors, the entire
screen was slid down enough to make room for the
Guru Meditation box,
which had a blinking red border and red text insid
e
(red it fatal,
yellow if not, but that was rare). There _could b
e_
a "Software
Failure" requester box with "press mouse button to
reset", but that
was _prior_ to a Guru Meditation screen, not the
Guru Meditation
itself.
to
The first one is the error code, typically
80000001 or 80000003,
Those are examples of 68000 trap error codes...
80000003 in particular
happens to be the odd address trap that started
things off (it was
rather common, especially if your code went off in the weeds and
tried to execute an instruction on an odd-byte
boundary).
There were also _lots_ of error codes that could
tell you specifics
about what really went wrong, but unless you had t
he
Rom Kernel Manual
(RKM) handy or did a lot of development, people
ignored the numbers.
> but I don't know what the 2nd number represents
.
Either "HELP" in ASCII (0x48454C50) or the address
of the process that
was running when the machine puked. It was only
useful if you were a
developer and used it to fire up ROMWack (an
internal debugger) to
sift through the remains of your process to see wh
at
it was doing when
something went wrong. Mostly, though, the second
number wasn't
particularly helpful.
"ROMWack is an internal debugger", do you
mean it's stored internally (ROM) and can be
accessed when things go wrong, or is it some
external program that can be run to see whats
wrong?
That could be useful if I could use it as I have
some games/software that sometimes causes
it to Guru, even after pluggin in my 4MB
RAM PCMCIA card to give my Amiga 600 a total
of 6MB of memory.
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
25 Aug
25 Aug
3:01 p.m.
On 8/26/06, aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
"ROMWack is an internal debugger", do you
mean it's stored internally (ROM) and can be
accessed when things go wrong, or is it some
external program that can be run to see whats
wrong?
It's internal if you have an old-enough version of the ROMs. I know
it was there in 1.2, but I don't know if it's still in there for 2.0
and up.
You need a serial terminal (or computer running a terminal emulator)
at 9600 baud on the serial port. Instructions are on the 'net
somewhere for how to get into it during a Guru situation (I don't have
an Amiga in front of me and can't check now).
That could be useful if I could use it as I have
some games/software that sometimes causes
it to Guru, even after pluggin in my 4MB
RAM PCMCIA card to give my Amiga 600 a total
of 6MB of memory.
Hmm... in that particular case, you might or might not be able to do
anything interesting, depending on how deeply you want to dig in your
game. ROMWack is not symbolic - you'll need to know intimate details
about the code you want to debug.
-ethan
6694
days inactive
6694
days old
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