CPU Emulator Crash

[GregT2]

I have been working on this project/course for a long time and really, really enjoy the book. But I guess I should give up on the simulator projects.

Here is my original problem, and more to the point, this forum seems to have many examples of similar problems from other users, and none of them seem to have any real resolution.

I tried installing a newer JVM, different PC, disabling multi-core, etc. These have various effects but bottom line, the CPU Emulator in particular seems to be unusably unreliable.

I wish I had the energy to contribute to fixing this in the code, but that is not my expertise. Hopefully somebody will be able to at some point, it's such a fun idea/book. Sigh.

[GregT2]

One other thing:

This problem is somewhat more tolerable (eg. you CAN make it work if you are patient enough to keep repeating the test until the CPU Emulator DOESN'T crash) if you:

1. Run at a slow speed.
2. Avoid switching tasks while it's running.

You still get big huge long Java stack traces that talk about NPE's and StrategyPaintManager and so on, but, it seems to work anyway. But, between #1 and the necessary retrying, it can take a half-hour, and oftentimes you find a 'real' problem and have to repeat the whole process anyway.

Obviously these symptoms sound like threading problems. It's ironic, or maybe not, that the book doesn't get into threading and interrupts. Oh, and lastly, I run Java apps all the time, some of them monsters like Eclipse, and none of them have problems remotely as bad as your simulator.