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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uchinews!spssig.spss.com!news.oc.com!utacfd.uta.edu!rwsys!sneaky!gordon From: gordon@sneaky.lonestar.org (Gordon Burditt) Subject: Re: Nethack Message-ID: <C990xF.43n@sneaky.lonestar.org> Organization: Gordon Burditt References: <1993Jun23.140652.2816@urbana.mcd.mot.com> <20bfrm$le7@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <20cab6$b2d@binkley.cs.mcgill.ca> Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1993 21:55:54 GMT Lines: 29 > Whenever I tried to play it more than once or twice, it would > die (on start up) complaining of some "init-prob error on 4 (215%)" > or SOMETHING like that (my memory fails me). I get this also, sometimes. The error suggests that the sum of the probabilities in some table don't add to 100%. In this case, since the program worked once, it means the tables have been trashed. Some additional information: After a failure, on a quiet system, you get the same failure, over and over. If you compare the installed executable vs. the one in the build directory, they are identical. HOWEVER, if you copy the executable in the build directory over the installed one, the problem seems to go away. For a while. After a failure, doing something time-consuming and disk-intensive, like building a kernel or grepping the news spool, the problem may go away. Conclusion, totally without proof: Modified data is getting cached somewhere, probably in the VM system. I suspect Nethack is modifying read-only storage somehow and the modified version is getting re-used. But I haven't found the place where it's doing it. Gordon L. Burditt sneaky.lonestar.org!gordon