German Abacus Help file bug.

[Chr$]

Minor thing...

I noticed recently that in the German version 2.25 of Psion Abacus on Dilwyn's site, that the help file would not open, even though it was present, instead reporting an error and then asking you to press space to continue.

I looked into it and it seems that the paths were specified wrong in the 'ABACUS' exe file - they were pointing to ram2_, dev3_ and sub3_ where they should be mdv1_, mdv2_ and mdv1_ (the first seems to be the help file location, the 2nd is the default path when loading/saving and I'm not sure what the 3rd is, but it certainly shouldn't be sub3_) ! So without the ABBA_HOB in ram2_ it wasn't going to work.

Here are fixed qzips of the mdv1_ and flp1_ versions, re-zipped from a dump of an original cartridge. (I believe the only change for the flp1_ version is the reference to flp1_ in the boot file).

These only work with 128k RAM and they will load but you won't get far unless you are using MGG ROM.

[dilwyn]

Thanks Chr$. Is it OK if I put these on my website in place of the ones there?

[Chr$]

Thanks Chr$. Is it OK if I put these on my website in place of the ones there?

Yes of course. I was hoping you'd see this.

Bear in mind that all I changed for the flp1_ version was the path in the boot file. I didn't see any references to flp1_ in the exe.... just noticed the 'clone' file in the original floppy version refers to flp1_ instead of mdv1_ and flp2_ instead of mdv2_, so you may want to change or replace that, not that there can be many people that are going to back it up from flp2 to flp1 nowadays.

[Chr$]

It occurred to me too: remember that German Abacus v2.45 that I found - it works fine with more than 128k ram (but not with more than 1mb), so assuming it is an official Psion release, it fixes the problem that the original German Abacus v2.25 has with only running on German QLs with 128k Ram. The other original German Psion v2.25 progs don't have an issue with more than 128k Ram, so perhaps the v2.45 Abacus was the only updated German Psion version, simply because getting it to run with extra ram was probably something customers wanted and it was the only one that required a fix in that respect.