Hollywood forums

It seems that the latest Polybios versions crash with many PDF files on AmigaOS3. To my surprise the same files don't crash with Polybios 1.0, but do crash with 1.1 and 1.2.

This only happens with 68k and 68k/FPU, but not with MorphOS or OS4 versions of Polybios.

Can be reproduced by downloading these two files http://jpv.wmhost.com/testi/pdf/ and try to open them with Hollywood's PDFViewer example program on 68k.

Just tested your files and they both open fine on WinUAE. Tested both the non-FPU and FPU versions. No problems at all with Polybios 1.2. What system did you test this on?

Well... I got a bug report from a user that RNOPDF crashes on WinUAE 4.3.0 with, for example, these two PDF files. Then I quickly tried them with RNOPDF and PDFViewer under AmiKit and Amiga Forever setups on Windows, and they indeed crashed there (except with Polybios 1.0). I also tested to open couple PDFs on my real A1200/060/P96 setup and it also crashed (my original test PDF opened fine, but one of these problematic did crash).

But now when I looked it again, there are more aspects in it. I didn't remember that Polybios had its issues with WinUAE 4.2.0 and older versions, and this explains crashes on my AmiKit/Forever setups, because they were using older WinUAE versions. When I now tried to update it to 4.2.1 or 4.3.0, crashes were gone on my emulation setup. So, we can pretty much forget my WinUAE tests now, because crashes on them were because of the wrong WinUAE versions.

Then I made more tests on my real A1200, and now it opened the problematic PDF files just fine this time, but when I kept re-opening PDF files, then it hanged again. It's a complete system freeze... but basically I can't blame these certain files anymore, because I got them open. Maybe there's something else on my real setup, be it patches, old hardware, Hollywood, or what, who knows.

So I probably made a bit hasty bug report... I don't have that valid facts on the table anymore

Only thing remaining is that why it crashes on the user who originally reported this to me. I'll have to ask more details and tests from him...

Ok, it looks now that this was mostly a user error. The original reporter had only 8 MB fast set in his emulator and when free mem went under 1 MB RNOPDF hanged... after increasing the amount of RAM it started to open the files. Although should Polybios handle low memory situations somehow better?

jPV wrote: ↑Wed Apr 01, 2020 6:50 pm Although should Polybios handle low memory situations somehow better?

Oh no, definitely not. Don't forget that Polybios' PDF engine was lifted straight out of Chrome and transplanted to run on an operating system from the 80s. Obviously programmers nowadays write code for host systems that can never run out of memory. I obviously won't go through millions of code lines and fix them all just to have a nice "Out of memory" error requester in case the user only has 8MB of memory

Hollywood itself, though, handles out of memory situation cleanly but this is just because it was designed this way right from the start. This is different for modern software, though.