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About a thousand years ago, I bought a new 286 motherboard from the local computer shop, and when I brought it home, DOS would boot on it, things like edlin and
by 13of40 11y ago
About a thousand years ago, I bought a new 286 motherboard from the local computer shop, and when I brought it home, DOS would boot on it, things like edlin and debug worked, but anything like a game (Lemmings!) would hang. I tore my hair out over this for a while until I noticed another symptom -- when I ran the 'date' command, the system time never changed. It turned out the clock on the motherboard was faulty, so it never fired the interrupt to tell the computer time was passing, so anything that depended on that interrupt for poor-man's threading would hang. But DOS booted up and ran like a champ.
- acomjean 11y agoSpeaking of time.. I inherited a bug that only showed up the last 5 minutes of an hour. Except I didn't know that. The first time I worked on it, I reproduced the error but before I got the debugger started the time went by and the new hour caused the bug to go away...(why does this bug not show when the debugger is on?) Eventually by hand tracing I figured it out.. Some weird time function was rounding the minutes to the nearest 10 minutes. When the time crept past 55 minutes rounded up to 60 and passed to a time function that didn't like... Only bug that was harder was a serial cable with flipped wires. Which kinda worked, but gave out garbage. We figured that out with a scope.