Author: GeoffW
Date: 10:52:06 12/15/04
Go up one level in this thread
Hello Franz
Thanks for the reply
>you´re right that Arena is quite stable now in most of its functions,
>but there still are some problems and bugs -
>some of them I´ve already reported in the (old) Arena support forum
>(even more than once!) long time ago, but they still exist in the latest
>version I have (Arena 1.1 Prerelease).
>
>This Arena crash I mentioned above I´ve discovered about a week ago, when
>I tried to create a mate position. For this purpose I had to call the
>´setup board´ quite a lot of times, and suddenly Arena didn´t work any
>longer: no reaction when calling menu functions, disappearing of menu bar
>labels, and - when closing Arena - first an error message ("Access violation"),
>and after that Windows was completely unstable! I couldn´t even shut down
>Windows normally, because it was ´hanging´, so only a double Ctrl+Alt+Del
>was successful.
>And yes - this crashing is repeatable 100%, also for earlier versions like
>1.092pr or 1.07 I can reproduce it by the following simple procedure:
>1) start Arena
>2) call the ´setup board´ (the fastest was is Ctrl-B)
>3) close the ´setup board´ with ´Ok´ (no need to change the position at all)
>4) repeat steps 2) and 3) about 30-times!
>
>Here on my system (Win98/128MB, where about 64-70MB are free after having
>started Arena) it´s almost _exactly_ after "30-times" calling this ´setup board´
>(with the steps above), that Arena is in this unstable state -
>with more free memory than my 64-70MB it might be necessary to repeat this
>steps a little more often (maybe 40-45 times).
I think you are correct, I tried this test whilst looking at the memory usage
figure from WinXP Task Manager, every time I opened the board setup window I
could see the memory usage creeping up very slightly. It was only a small amount
and as I have 512Megs of RAM it would take forever on my PC to cause a real
problem. I would guess Win98's less elegant memory handling and less memory on
your laptop explain why it shows up as a problem on your machine
>Ok, I know that this problem wouldn´t happen too often for normal Arena users,
>but it´s definitely a bug in Arena (and IMO a serious one!).
>OTOH this is only _one_ of a longer list of bugs in Arena, that I have found
>in the last time, but since I´m no longer welcome in the new Arena forum
>(although having reported dozens of problems and bugs in the last years!),
>it´s now impossible for me to post such problems in this new forum.
Yes, it is a great shame that several of us Arena users/fans are being alienated
from the Chess Arena website. I think it is their loss, I also cannot log into
the forum and have like you also decided to not ask for any new versions.
Strange behaviour indeed.
Just for info, as I thought it would be helpful to be able to download Arena
from an alternative site, I recently asked Martin Blume if I could make it
available for download from my website. He declined my request, oh well never
mind saved me a job of making a website.
>
>But - to say the truth - this isn´t really a big problem for me:
>With the current Arena team and their (more than) strange behaviour against
>the Arena users, I´ve finally decided to stop any further support of Arena
>by myself - I´ll probably switch back to one of the latest Arena versions
>(maybe 1.07) and live with the few bugs that still exist.
>And - not to forget - there are also some _very_ good alternative GUIs (with
>much less bugs!) like e.g. ShredderClassic ... ;-)
Chess Arena is the by far the best free one for running engine - engine matches.
The last version I have got works pretty well for me and does what I need, so I
am happy to stick with that version.
regards Geoff
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.