Virtual Prime on MacOS High Sierra, crashing and menu text vanishing

[JDW]

I've been running, or trying to run, the Virtual Prime simulator on my 2015 15" MacBook Pro and on my 2009 27" iMac, both running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.5 (newest as of July 2018). I even tested this on my late 2015 5K iMac at the office and found Virtual Prime to have the same problems -- that iMac also runs the latest High Sierra OS.

The Virtual Prime app launches fine and works fine at first, but when I switch to other apps like Safari, doing something for a while, then switch back to the Prime app, strange things occur. The biggest problem is that text in menus vanishes in a seemingly random way. Consider these screenshots:

After switching away and then back to Virtual Prime (menu text missing):

https://cl.ly/sxpV/Image%202018-07-16%20...2%20AM.png

After freshly launching Prime (no problem):

https://cl.ly/sxtq/Image%202018-07-16%20...9%20AM.png

And whenever I quite Virtual Prime, it quite nearly always crashes. The only time it usually doesn't crash on Quit is if I freshly launch Virtual Prime, then do nothing except to immediately Quit. But if I launch the app and click Home and type 6*6 ENTER to get 36 and then Quit, Virtual Prime will crash and throw up the crash reporter dialog.

So it's a mess of crashing and menu text vanishing that makes Virtual Prime almost unusable on 3 very different Macs (which proves the Mac hardware isn't cause it) running High Sierra with boot drives being SSDs and formatted APFS. I just ordered 2 Primes, so I hope the actual calculators don't crash like this. Even so, I would be interested in working with HP to resolve this issue so I can actually run Virtual Prime on my Macs in a usable, crash-free, pristine menu way. Please tell me what other information is needed to achieve that.

And if any of my fellow High Sierra Mac users are reading this (High Sierra running on computers with SSDs and therefore using APFS formatted drives), please test Virtual Prime on your systems and report back here to say if you see the same things I do.

Whatever help you can suggest or provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[JDW]

Tim Wessman and Cyrille de Brébisson, any thoughts?

My fellow Mac users using High Sierra and APFS, any thoughts? (Surely there must be one of you out there.)

[tcab]

I use the latest firmware Virtual Prime on High Sierra on a Macbook Air and it runs ok. I may have had something similar to your situation once after an update but managed to resolve it somehow - I can't remember how, sorry. Something to do with restoring a more stable Prime backup and copying across programs I needed using the connectivity kit.

[Tim Wessman]

Hello,

We have seen the crashing on just one of our test systems. Identical software versions, and it doesn't exhibit it on those other machines... :/

The disappearing text thing is a long standing issue that was very hard to track down because it was so rare. It recently started showing up regularly on my development machine so I hope I can finally get to the root cause. As of right this moment I have not found and fixed that one.

[JDW]

I appreciate the replies.

Tim, whenever the text goes missing, I also see strangeness in the menus too, as shown in this screenshot:

https://cl.ly/t0tI/Image%202018-07-18%20...3%20AM.png

And here's how it looks normally:

https://cl.ly/t0zf/Image%202018-07-18%20...7%20AM.png

And as I said, a simple relaunching of the app fixes it, but it occurs so often I am constantly relaunching the app, making it hardly usable.

Please tell me how to test so I can assist you in getting to the root cause of the bug. I'm willing to do just about anything to help you get this fixed.