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Thanks I'll try that today, was working on honey-do list yesterday.
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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Turns out I needed to RTFM a little better.
I am using a 8255 (PIO) to talk to the keypad and display and was trying to use Mode 1 on Port A without doing the appropriate handshacking. So I put it in straight input mode 0 and it works like a charm.
Thanks for your feedback.
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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People who used the as IDE controller ran into similar problems. That's why I plan to skip all I/O devices and will try to access the registers of the IDE devices directly, as memory mapped I/O devices themselves.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I'm beginning to learn the same thing.
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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That sounds like the video chip that was used in the TI-99/4A home computer.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Exactly. Oldschool graphics chips suitable for 8 bit computers are hard to get.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Restoring Division, usually. There are other options, but they make more sense in hardware than in software.
By the way take a look at Quarter Square Multiplication, it costs a bunch of ROM but it's a lot faster than bit-by-bit multiplication. Usually I wouldn't recommend it, but for 3D stuff you may need the speed.
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CodeWraith wrote: I want to see 3D graphics on an 8 bit computer
A very long time ago, at a university not too far away...
When I was in college I did an independent study course as one of my electives. My project was to implement Binary Space Partitioning[^] as a method for doing 3D hidden-surface removal graphics. The computer was a Z-80 running CP/M, and the display was 256x256 with 8 colors per pixel. The code was written in PL/I-80[^] from Digital Research. The program was so large it was written as a bunch of overlays and took a couple of disk swaps (8" floppies) to render an image.
As far as I know I was the first implementor of the BSP algorithm after the original authors. Another claim to fame is that this was the same algorithm used in the 1st version of DOOM. This happened almost 40 years ago, in 1982-1983.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Well, that is a new one...
I just opened a C# project after a week and the contents of some of the .cs files has somehow been replaced with MetadataAsSource contents. It looks like they are from a completely separate project too. Fnu, but backups FTW
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My primary development laptop has decided to start tossing BSODs which is unacceptable. I'll accept that Microsoft might just crash if I get too happy with plugging stuff in and out, etc, but this in the middle of just typing. This laptop is a re-branded Clevo and has always had driver issues. The fact that Microsoft insists on wanting to install bad drivers is beside the point. So far the errors have been:
- MEMORY_MANAGEMENT
- system_thread_exception_not_handled
- faulty_hardware_corrupted_page (new one for me)
- critical_structure_corruption
Researching, almost all of the reference is to bad memory. So, over the weekend, I fired up memtest86 to soak test the RAM. A dozen passes, no RAM errors.
Question 1) Using RAM test tools, have you ever found a bad RAM? Replaced it and all was well?
 So I just searched my records for how old this machine is, and I'm pushing almost 5 years (within a couple of months). Me thinks its time to start shopping.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Yes, many times, as a tech back in the day.
I've had bad RAM, brand new, out of the box, as recent as a a couple years ago.
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Interesting. How did you detect it? Swap out modules or run something like memtest86?
This last crash at 7:13 this morning mentioned something about a chrome.sys driver. This crash happened when I launched chrome.
Quite oddly, google returns no info about this file.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Swap modules.
RAM testing tools really don't find intermittent faults. They're good for finding solid faults though, which are surprisingly rare in my experience.
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just swapped the modules. I have 64GB of ram in this unit. The crash seems to happen when I have a number of VMs running. This would certainly push the ram usage up.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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If it happens relatively consistently when pushing memory to its limit, take them all out. Try to reproduce it again with a single module still in it. If it doesn't happen, take it out and replace it with one of the other ones, and try again. With luck, you might be able to narrow it down to the one faulty module.
Even if you find one, keep going until you've gone over all of them.
Once you're pretty confident you've found which is faulty, add the others by themselves. Then re-add the bad one. The idea is that you keep trying until you're very confident you've isolated it.
It's a time-consuming process, but might be worth it in the end.
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(obligatory it works on my computer).
Never had issues with solid state hardware (motherboard, cpu , memory, ssd, gpu... )
Most/All of the time it was with hard-drives starting to have bad sectors.
It's your work computer, I'd start looking to change it now and hope you can find something that is not too backorder.
5 years is not that long, but you should be able to find something shiny to replace it.
good luck and do backups.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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This can easily happen if RAM got fragmented from too many allocations and deallocations. Usually best solution in this case is to increase size of your page swap file. Should be 4 times of physical memory (make sure the value is in the power of 2).
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Valid point, but I'm not really pushing the machine that hard. Sure, I've got a few browsers up and VS Studio assorted editions. The biggest thing for me is that I made sure to install enough RAM to handle multiple VMs. I see very little paging.
Plus - I've seen the crash at very odd times with little or nothing running (but with the VMs operational).
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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To add to wahat Dave said, there are a huge range of faults, which are spectacularly hard to pick up with a memory test: stuck or floating address lines are always a good one (and can appear only after a period of use). If a AL gets stuck, the wrong memory is affected but it reads back as good - the only way to spot it is to write different values to each memory location and then check they are what and where you expected, and that they don't "echo" in a different location as well. That's just not practical in a reasonable timeframe for a memory tester because the sun will change to a red dwarf first ... 
If it's floating (i.e. a track has broken) then it fails sometimes but seems to work much of it.
Swap the module out, see if the problem goes away.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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you allude to my question - in all my years futzing around with PCs, I have yet to see a ram test fail. I get the address bar issue and understand the concept. It really boils down to how much time do you have?
It's my understanding that when these memory boards are made they can be tested resting on a bed of pins. The test system can easily check each circuit. Once it gets to the PC, well...
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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charlieg wrote: 1) Using RAM test tools, have you ever found a bad RAM? Replaced it and all was well?
Yes.
Your issues may be related to the memory controller though, so you can try and try and never catch the issue until it manifests. Issues on ground (half signals, floating signals) on some line may cause that, or heat altering some line / memory cell characteristics enough to kill it.
GCS d--(d-) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Yes. I have a nice pile of defected memory...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: defected
So it is working... but for the enemy.
GCS d--(d-) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Marketing? 
Software Zen: delete this;
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I may have in my desktop. I'd been getting crashes that my crash analysis tool suggested were probably memory related over the last year and which got markedly worse recently, memtest86 ran clear overnight. Friday morning I down-clocked my ram from DDR3-2400 to DDR3-1600 and have been crash free over the weekend; long enough to suggest the issue is solved.
That said I'm sure sure it's an inherent memory problem; my CPU is watercooled so there's not a ton of airflow around the ram; and since early this year I've been using an aircooled GPU again (and more recently a hotter/faster one). My ram is hot to the touch, so it's possible I'm just seeing an overheating issue that memtest86 by leaving the rest of the system at idle didn't trigger. I'm probably going to order a ram cooler later this week and see if that lets me restore to full speed operation.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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