ROAM Technical News

Old News

I suspect that Apple's PDS 601 Upgrade card (for 040's) has a ROM on the card itself. This is why a upgraded Q650 has a different boot sound. Using ROAM on machines with upgrade cards that have a local ROM DIMM that's accessed much faster than normal RAM... well, ROAM will actually slow them down. The local ROM DIMM on the PDS card might be a lot faster than accessing the RAM copy on the motherboard. If you have a NuBus 601 card, your milage may vary. It all depends on where the ROM is being accessed from on those cards. Look at the with & without ROAM statisitics---with should be smaller than without. Don't always listen to the calculated percentages.

ROAM's MultiprocessingLib allocator does not change the memory usage you see in About this Macintosh. ROAM is still using 8MB of RAM, it just is not accounted for by the About this Macintosh totals.

If you have problems with ROAM installing at bootup, a few users have found that changing ROAM Extensions' sysz id:0 resource to 09010000 will allow ROAM to load at bootup. Future versions of ROAM will have this change.

This can be potentially confusing, but I have released two beta versions simultaneously. Please try beta 5. If it fails to install on your machine, try beta 4. A failure to install would be classified as when ROAM Control reports that "ROAM is not installed." during a normal bootup. If ROAM fails to install under beta 4 or beta 5, please email me a note saying the version of ROAM, your MacOS version, and why you think it failed.

Delete your preferences file before installing either version of ROAM! You will need to reregister ROAM though. Sorry for the inconvienience. However, for testing purposes, this will insure that the correct allocator is used.

ROAM 1.5.1b5 is available. This is an attempt to merge the "ROAM MemAllocTest" into the "ROAM Extension". It also adds a version string to the Debug Log every time the Ext or CP loads. The PEF allocator is given precedence of the 4 allocators in this version. It will be changed back to the MP allocator once I get feedback that the PEF allocator works in this version.

ROAM v1.5.1b4 is available. It no longer only tries to use 2 of the 4 allocators. It tries all 4 now. Fixed some off-by-1 errors that might have caused some mischeif if you installed and uninstalled ROAM many times sucessively, or had an extension that was within 4KB of the ROM buffer.. and it tried to write to that page. It also reenables two of the 4 allocators so all 4 are used.

Hey hackers! Got a New World Mac? Want to hack your ROM without having to understand the Trampoline decompressor that fiddles with the "Mac OS ROM" file in your System Folder? Use ROAM's Save option to save the ROM to disk. Then use a hex editor to modify your ROM. Try out your modifications using the Load option. (Saving the ROM to disk takes a really long time... I'll look into fixing this! Loading the ROM might cause a freeze! Consider this untested... but a possible future feature.)

Try out ROAM v1.5.1b3. It fixes the double-X'd out icon for the extension when option is held at boot. It should fix the FE0C crashing problem. (This means that ROAM works better on PowerCenter and PowerTower clones now.) The unregistered version now timesout the shareware reminder dialog after 5 seconds or so.

The DeactivateFloatingWindows crash happens on 8.5 & 8.6 MacOS. *shrug*

I cannot find any info about the bit-width of the ROM or RAM for the Quadra 650 era Macs. Therefore, I am still only speculating that the ROM is somehow faster than RAM on those machines. I have no idea how accelerator cards for those machines were designed, so it is possible that they have an on-board ROM. I do know that the Q650 had 100ns access times on its ROM though. Mine has 60ns RAM, so something doesn't quite make sense. (If you feel like lending me a 601 upgrade card, I'd be happy to check it out.) If I tear apart my Q650 and follow some traces, I'll report what I find.

ROAM 1.5.1b2 notes: It correctly saves window position, and works on NuBus Macs with 601 processors. Use MacOS 8.6 or newer if possible. I have to do some more investigation, but some NuBus 68040 Macs might not see a performance increase. (Their ROMs might have 64 bit data buses, and have 32 bit RAM buses. Slower ROM with wider bandwidth will beat RAM.)

ROAM 1.5 might cause a type 1 or type 2 error when you quit it. If this happens, you most likely clicked the window's close box instead of choosing "Quit" from the File menu. Will be fixed in the next version. The solution to the problem is to choose "Quit" instead of clicking the close box on the window.

ROAM 1.5 is not 100% compatible with all NuBus Macs. The NuBus testers for v1.5 apparently did not have configurations that were similar enough to the rest of the NuBus Macs out there... v1.6 is in beta testing right now.

ROAM v1.5 is now available. Try it before you buy it! (7-25-99)

What's new in v1.5?

ROAM now has a GUI!
ROAM supports some simple AppleEvents.
ROAM works on G3 upgraded NuBus PowerMacs.
Requires 8MB of free RAM. (non-virtual memory RAM!)
Smart ROAM Extension "sleeps" until you upgrade to a newer version of MacOS.

If ROAM crashes on your machine, or you can reproduce a crash reliably, please contact me, sbytnar at kagi.com. A Subject with "ROAM Web Feedback" in it would be nice.