Greetings, I have a Peg II/G4 with Radeon 7000 and 256MB RAM.

I've run into a problem with some software (Amiga software mostly) partially or totally freezing and generally becoming unresponsive. It doesn't affect the rest of the system, unless it's depending on the frozen app for something.

The curious thing about this is that the stuck app can be un-stuck if some other software that gives the system some constant activity is run, For example, having a game controller hooked up to a USB port is enough minor activity to get stuck apps to move slowly, and higher-demand things like playing an MP3 or video or game will make the stuck app run at full speed again. If the activity ceases, the app will return to stuck status unless something else is done.


Does/did anyone else experience a similar problem, or have any insights into what may cause it, or fix it?

Oh yeah, a few examples of software that have 'stuck' on me:

Diskmaster 2
Photogenics 5 (only when the little numerical sliders are used)
Matrix screenblanker (even the Matrix.elf Morph version)

Have you checked your Trance Stats and task Manager at the same time?

Maybe this will give you an Idea of how the Multitasking
is being bogged down?

I have no clue what the problem would be, Maybe its just
quirks with some 68k code.

sorry to be of no help.

Hi EWS, welcome to MorphZone.

I've noticed this particular problem more on the Peg2 than on the Peg1/G3 with X-Arc. X-Arc worked fine on my Peg1, but when I upgraded (kept the same hdd, replacing only the boot.img) X-Arc acts as you describe other software--and only when it does it's internal "version check."

About Matrix blanker, that's a known problem. It has existed since MorphOS1.3 as far as I know.

@EWS:

I don't know about diskmaster2, but:

MatrixScreenBlanker is broken, don't use it after all until a fixed version is releases. Back then the author promised to release a fixed version, don't know what happened to this.

Photogenics/Slider problem... oh yeah... that's an old problem of Photogenics. You can encouter it very easily when you use the sliders quickly. To be honest I didn't encountered that effect on Peg that much. I mostly had this problem on my A4k. Simple solution: don't move the sliders fast (when u released the slider wait a moment until the task is done, then continue with moving the slider). It's some kind of process priority issue inside PG5.

Thanks for the help. Haven't seen anything obvious from Trance or Taskmanager. Looks like for now I'll just have to avoid software that 'sticks', and hope this is something that can/will be fixed in a future update. At least the software I've swapped out seems to be a trade-up in most cases.

Matrix replaced with CGXBlanker
Diskmaster replaced with Directory Opus 4.16
(both work very well)

In playing around, I ran across another program which falls under the "Stuck unless there's other activity" category ... the Cyberlemmings display hack.