New releases

[Valentin Albillo]

(06-08-2021 08:24 PM)Oulan Wrote:  Just a quick info, I upgraded a bunch of goXX emulators to cope with changes on android. Now they are ok with android up to 11 (tested on android 9 and 11)

How about upgrading go71b or at least correcting some of the most blatant bugs that make it almost unusable ?

I've paid you twice for what I naively believed it would be a quality, properly working product, only to find a real real real chore to use it for anything, from four-liners up. Want some examples ?

- listing a program longer than a few lines with LIST in the n-lines miniscreen outputs garbage more often than not, requiring up to four executions of LIST to get something usable.

- inputting a program line containing a SUB declaration with array arguments more often than not reports a syntax error Invalid Argument at the first such argument. The only remedy is to kill go71b and relaunch it, which will then accept the SUB declaration unchanged.

- excuting a CALL to a subprogram often results in error Sub Not Found even though you can see it in the program listing and the call is correct. The only remedy is to kill go71b and relaunch it, which will then find the subprogram. Attempting to trace execution by single-stepping through the subprogram is next to impossible.

- the variables are lost extremely often, sometimes after just going to some other app for a moment or after minimizing go71b for a moment, or after just a few runs of a program, any program. You notice it because you run the program and it unexpectedly halts with an error Division by Zero or Invalid Argument or whatever. You inspect the variable and though it was assigned a value (A=20.7654) its value is still 0 or some other random value.

If then from the command line you assign some value to any variable and then immediately display it, you'll get either 0 or some random value. The only remedy is to kill go71b and relaunch it, which will then assign values to variables properly. It happens extremely frequently but I've never see this corrupting the program itself or the file chain, it just trashes all the variables.

- if you specify a nonexisting file for file commands other than EDIT (say LIST PEPE where PEPE doesn't exist) you'll get all your variables immediately trashed, as described above. The only remedy is to kill go71b and relaunch it, which will then make variables useable again. Executinng OFF IO or trying to disable HP-IL is useless, the next file error will trigger the problem and the same happens if you try to catch the error with ON ERROR, it's useless.

- many other problems, such as timing not being accurate, 128x speed being actually 64x, configuration settings not being permanently recorded, so that after the frequent killings I'm forced to set the speed again every time, which wastes even more time, the keyboard repeating keystrokes like mad at the higher speed settings, execution getting paralyzed for up to 20-30 seconds every so often, both a running program and typing something at the command line, etc, etc.
...

And so on, I compiled a detailed list of all problems I found but my laptop died and I no longer have it for the time being. Anyway, the bottom line is I've been using your go71b to create and run my programs and my articles, and it's been an extremely unpleasant and frustrating experience, wasting more time working around the bugs than actually getting results, frustration compounded by the fact that I've paid you for it. Twice.

I'd expect that at long last you will finally stand up and correct this sad state of affairs, which certainly is the honest thing to do after taking the money and miserably failing to deliver, but I've noticed that you didn't reply to the post by Bob Prosperi above and I've heard that you usually do act likewise with anyone asking you to correct bugs so I'm not holding my breath.

V.