So today I got out the 84PSE and ran a game program of mine that used the graph screen as a play field.

Rendered the home screen fine, ClrHome worked when I pushed the start button. Because there was a menu at the bottom of the screen, I had the program draw a bunch of null lines to cover it up.

Oh, crap.

Instead of drawing null lines, it drew solid lines. I thought something was wrong with the program, but nothing could be found. The command was :Line(0,X,94,X,0 but for some bizarro reason the final 0 wasn't registering and it was drawing a straight line. I tried all my other programs. Every single one had the same problem. The commands would say to draw a blank line but it would draw a solid one every time.

I checked the MODE settings, and they're all the same as they were the last time I used the programs and they worked fine. The FORMAT menu on the graph was the same too. I went to my memory manager program and cleared all the entries/variables/lists, I used GarbageCollect and tried again. Nothing.

I haven't used any shifty Assembly programs recently that would screw something up. Just a "chemistry tools" pack from the archive here, Mirage OS (although that's worked fine for the 2 months I've used it) and the Touhou 83 beta from united-TI (again, I haven't used it in a month and everything's been running fine).

What the hell's going on?

Easy to fix, just do a simple Reset. Some assembly program corrupted part of RAM; that's an interestingly-specific symptom of the problem.

Well, yeah. I haven't tried to run *every single operation* to see if it works or not, so I don't know if it applies just to the lines or to some other archaic thing I've never used before. But the thing that boggles me is that I haven't been using any weird ASM programs. The only thing that could have caused it would have been the chemistry pack from this archive, and that only has about 3 assembly commands. Mirage and Touhou have run for a couple months now without borking my RAM.

Should I do some more tests to see what could have gone wrong and post the results here, or should I just archive anything useful and FALCON CLEAR?

Archive your programs. Clear your RAM. End of story.

Cool story bro.

It worked

You used Mirage OS, a shifty asm program.

Trust me, you will be better off without that program, get NoShell, CrunchyOS, or DCS.

MirageOS is not a shifty assembly program. It's a proven stable Flash application...it's one of the first ever written, way back when in 2000-2001, and if I'm not mistaken, it was reviewed by TI (I believe applications had to be before the public key was released). I know that's not saying much, but still.

You CANNOT blame shells for the faults of assembly programs run through them. The original post quotes assembly programs which very well could have caused these issues.

I've seen the source to MirageOS and I wrote Noshell and I can tell you that Noshell is a far more unstable application, doing very scary things with the parser hook, as opposed to MirageOS.

Despite having written alternatives to MirageOS, when I want to run a game, I do it through MirageOS.

If there is an issue that can be duplicated using MirageOS itself or even with a single assembly program, I'd be happy to research it and get to the bottom of it.

Here's one for you. If you plug in a SilverLink while MOS is running, your calculator will crash. I duplicated this several times back in the day.

Curious, I put MirageOS on my calc (I use only DCS usually). Strangely, I tried the same thing but my calc didn't crash... Maybe it's because I have DoorsCS6.2 on it also

A must issue a gotcha that BrandonW pointed out - this was MOS 1.1, not the current 1.2.

...I recall that 1.1 gradually took up tons of space when you tried to run archived programs...

this is a semi-fairly off-topic question, but in your opinion, what is the most stable/best shell out there (hopefully without bias *ahem* =D)? (or is that just a stupid question? hmm...)

Most stable: MirageOS
The best: DoorsCS

I can live with that, I admit that Doors CS has a reputation for instability even if I'm fairly confident I've improved stability problems significantly since 5.0.

Actually, DoorsCS in itself is stable, its the way how it handles Ion, asm and BASIC programs that mess up the calc...

I must disagree.
The Best: MirageOS
The flashiest: DoorsCS

Honestly, I found Doors to be a PITA to actually use - a virtual mouse driven by arrow keys just doesn't work.

I have to agree there I use calcutil in most cases because it has all the features I use of DCS with out having to move a mouse with the arrow keys.

Not to toot my own horn here, how about TabFuncs?

I'd agree, but add most user-friendly to DCS. It's a pain to teach people how to use MOS. The DCS interface just makes more sense. Once you learn MOS, though, you can do what you need to do faster.

That's fair, I can live with that. I intended Doors CS to be easier to use for new users, and I acn admit that the DCS interface is more clunky and less hotkey-friendly once you get to know MOS.

Actually, I would've used DoorsCS even without all of its main features just because it has this *very cool* mouse! It makes my calc look like a small computer...