The Sinclair QL Forum

NormanDunbar wrote:Maybe this helps?

WL wrote:I had a quick look at the EXEP problem.

It is probably here to stay, as it is due to the way the hotkey system calculates the free memory (in ee_hk_grab_asm) before reserving it to deprive the Psion prog of it.

The relevant code there is:

Code: Select all

        move.l  sys_sbab(a0),d1          ; bottom of basic
        sub.l   sys_fsbb(a0),d1          ; less bottom of free
        sub.l   #$400,d1                 ; less gap

Further on, the HK system reserves the resulting memory in D1 for job 0 (!) and releases it once the Psion prog is started and grabbed its memory.

These pointers are mostly set up in smsq_mem_init_asm where the memory map is initialized.

However, most modern SMSQE systems (notably Qx0, QPC, SMSQMulator,Q68) use a slightly different way to set up the memory, as they artificially limit the amount of free memory available to the slave blocks to 1MiB (in smsq_mem_1mb_init_asm). This makes sense to avoid long searches through the slave block in machines with lots of memory. The side-effect is that the HK system believes it has far less memory to play with than it actually does, so it only reserves (on a quick test with SMSQmulator with 32 MiB) about 820 KiB for Sbasic, thus allowing the Psion prog to hog all of the real memory.

There probably is a way around this by modifying the HK routine in ...grab_asm, but I personally am very hesitant to touch this part of the code.

Maybe you could draw the user's attention to Psion Xchange, which does not use up all of the memory.