There’s not much news for the past days, as half of the entire development team has been bedridden by a spring flu, which luckily is improving. However, during this period we did a stress test to hunt a nasty memory corruption bug found in Civilization:

Eventually the memory heap corruption bug was reproduced, and thanks to extensive debug logging, the culprit was a double-release of color table handle in window manager auxiliary window list entry which was not implemented correctly. With additional checks in memory manager handle “handling”, we’re working on fixing this issue and hopefully will catch similar issues faster in the future with the added handle validation code.

Other notable improvements done in the past weeks include:

• Near-completed scrollbar (CDEF 1) support
• Bug fixes to Control Manager (which was using dereferenced handles after calling routines which move memory, causing random crashes)
• List Manager bug fixes (alignment of items, scroll working, and scroll bar support, incorrect bit masking, etc.)
• Fixed FCOSX interpreted accidentally as FLOGBX. They both had same selector, but different trap (FP68K vs Elems68K). This allows ZeroGravity to display force indicator correctly, and fixes Test Drive II: The Duel road rendering almost completely.
• Other minor fixes & improvements (MapRgn trap implemented, OpenPicture pen hide bug, DeltaPoint byteswap bug, FindDialogItem trap implemented, ScrollRect was not calculating source address correctly in non-clipped downwards scrolling, etc.)
• Somehow sound has started to work in Microsoft BASIC, so the “Music” sample app now plays music in BASIC without issues
• Optimizations to the 68K emulator