Keen 1 status patch ASCII glitch

[CommanderSpleen]

Just a little detail that's nagged at me for a long time. When using the palette patch and the 'big versatile status patch', when you exit to DOS, the bottom of that big text window has a segment of text at the bottom-left. "???§???STATUS.CK1 nment". I've noticed it for years, but only just thought to track down the culprit.

Any thoughts on how to clear it up? Something to do with these lines, perhaps:

Code: Select all

Status patch:
%patch $13084  "STATUS.CK1" $00 

Code: Select all

Palette patch:
%patch $13054 
       00 00 00 #black 
       00 00 42 #blue 
       00 40 00 #green 
       00 42 42 #cyan 
       42 00 00 #red 
       42 00 42 #magenta 
       42 21 00 #brown 
       24 24 24 #bright gray 
       06 06 06 #gray 
       21 21 63 #bright blue 
       20 63 20 #bright green 
       21 63 63 #bright cyan 
       63 21 21 #bright red 
       63 21 63 #pink 
       63 63 21 #yellow 
       63 63 63 #white 

Hmm... checking the exe dump, what it's meant to be outputting is "Null pointer assignment". So maybe somewhere between these two patches they are causing this error? But it seems eerily convenient that a patch should be overwriting the description of the very error it causes.

Edit: Ah, it seems to be nothing to do with the status patch. Removing it but leaving in the palette patch results in "???§???inter assignment".

Edit: Taking out the colour data removes the glitch (and results in a rather interesting palette). So I guess the ideal solution here would be to find another unoccupied area in the executable? But I have no idea what part of the rest of the patch references the array.

[levellass]

Man, and people call ME fussy.

Is it the palette causing the NPA or perhaps it's normal for the code to output a string from that area that's been corrupted?

[CommanderSpleen]

Aye, procrastination can take on some amusing forms.

Well since the "Null pointer assignment" message doesn't come up at all without that part of the patch, it would seem a portion of the palette data somehow gets interpreted as code.

[Dr. Kylstein]

My improved version of the palette patch puts the color data elsewhere and avoids this error.

[CommanderSpleen]

Ah! Forgot that was an option. Case closed!