Conflicting XROM numbers / ROM map / AMC OS/X

[akaTB]

Life is short, and the ROM is full!

An old saying that is always good!

[hth313]

I kind of feel that having a message that says there is a duplicate XROM is enough. You can save some ROM space by not rubbing in that it is bad.

[rprosperi]

The truth is that it IS bad for almost all users, as they won't understand why things are working wonky, so telling them it's 'bad' will lead them to do something about about it before that happens. The very few people that do understand it, know enough to ignore the warning and proceed with informed expectations.

[hth313]

Seems like I have an uphill battle here, LOL

The truth is that per design it is allowed. It is not any worse than running an arbitrary RPN program that makes use of plug-in modules and inserting the wrong module that happens to have same XROM number. A random function is executed. As long as the module inserted isn't the PPC ROM, you are reasonable safe.

[rprosperi]

Seems like I have an uphill battle here, LOL

The truth is that per design it is allowed. It is not any worse than running an arbitrary RPN program that makes use of plug-in modules and inserting the wrong module that happens to have same XROM number. A random function is executed. As long as the module inserted isn't the PPC ROM, you are reasonable safe.

We agree on all those points.

In fact the original design was somewhat weak, IMHO. Simply marking modules that HP sold with the same XROM ID with an "X" in the title was a feeble attempt at managing this 'issue', but most likely the core OS behavior was set by the time this was a real world issue. In the early 41C days, the odds of users buying 4-5 HP Application ROMs was surely considered unlikely, to say nothing of the 3rd-party market and with all that, 32 is hardly enough IDs.

Still, at this point, the 41X has made 'trying out' ROMs so easy and quick, that many folks will simply plug them in to see what happens, so a stern warning is a good thing to call attention to possible problems or at least inconsistent behavior.

Adding information showing the XROM IDs will help here, but I'm confident it will still be an issue.

But thanks for the discussion about this, it helps to explain it to readers and to understand different views about the issue.

[dlachieze]

XROM IDs are now displayed in the ROM map with firmware V2.1. If it will not prevent issues with conflicting IDs, but I'm sure this will help a lot in finding the root cause. Thanks for implementing it.