SmoothText 1.1.8

[Tripo]

Thanks for your hard work.

Will test and see if it is more stable.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Woohoo! :lol:

That seems to have done the trick!

SmoothText 0.9.3 now works on my main P3 800MHz install, no exceptions or memory leaks or any FastMM errors thrown so far. It's looking good and feels stable.

Gonna try the Override Standard Controls and see how it goes.

EDIT: Okay, so Overriding is still a bit problematic; all hooked windows lock up. Evidenced by the continued functioning of CSRSS (Alt+Tab still works) and the Windows Security (CTRL+ALT+DEL) which are processes that are not hookable by SmoothText due to insufficient privileges.

Nonetheless, SmoothText in Firefox back! Really appreciate the effort you put into it! (Especially to iron out the bugs that my computer seems to keep throwing. )

BTW, is it coded in Delphi 6?

Oop, one memory leak error. But it didn't go into a crash cycle as it did sometimes before. Log attached.

Edited June 8, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[WildBill]

Yup, it's coded in Delphi 6 Professional (you don't actually need the Pro version, but that's the version I always buy).

I was going through the code tonight preparing to make some more improvements (planning to simplify things even more), and I found that the hash code that I thought was thread-safe wasn't thread-safe after all. I made a bunch of small changes, and it should be thread-safe now. I've posted a 0.9.4 update, and I really think this will improve reliability.

[Colonel O'Neill]

0.9.4 continues to function excellently on my desktop.

However, it throws some errors when used on my VM USP5 and fully updated laptop 2000.

Which is very strange. Nonetheless, I will pull some nLiting to find some pattern.

Here are the logs from my laptop:

Edited June 10, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[WildBill]

I looked at the logs, but so far I haven't been able to figure out where the problem is. In the meantime, I made a lot of changes that should improve matters. Version 0.9.5 is up, which hopefully will be even more stable.

[CaptainStacks]

Hi WildBill, I was wondering if you had any input on this, check out the following picture:

By holydicks***

Notice how the text for both running programs is correctly smoothed, but the actual start menu button itself is untouched.

Sure, it's a small thing that most people probably wouldn't notice, but is there a reason why the Start text isn't smooth?

I've been using Smoothtext for quite a while now, and its something I've noticed pretty much since the beginning, and I just thought today, since I had time to make a post, I'd see if you had any input on this.

Keep up the great work!

Edited June 12, 2009 by CaptainStacks

[Colonel O'Neill]

As what seems to be the trend here, 0.9.5 is great on my desktop, but not so much on my laptop or it's VM.

A quick question: When it works, is it on a single-core or dual-core?

My desktop is single-core, no problems there. OK.

My laptop is dual-core, so is the VMware VM. Not OK.

I am going to see what happens when I fiddle with the processor count on VMware.

EDIT: Setting VMWare to use only one processor fixes it! 0.9.5 is now working in VM with single processor. Now I just gotta figure out how to make an actual OS use only one core. Override Standard Controls is working as well. Translucent taskbar does not still.

@CaptainStacks: I just noticed that too! Never did before, Oo.

EDIT2: Minor glitch:

Edited June 13, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[WildBill]

I've only tested it on single-core machines. The machine I develop it on has a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Mmm... That seems to be the root of the problems.

I set my real install to use the /numcpu=1 switch in boot.ini and SmoothText works. Otherwise, FastMM throws all these errors, which explains why my errors are unreproducible on your P4 single-core.

Nonetheless, Windows 2000 seems to be happier running on one core (no more heating up at boot), so no big loss there.

I'm also trying to see if ObjectBar interferes with SmoothText in someway, as my ObjectBarred installs fail to use Override Standard Controls (hard crash), my clean install in VM works fine.

[Tripo]

one suggestion.

Could you change so it not save anything to the registry.

and save all things in a ini in app path.

if I enable one thing and it works then I maybe enable one more thing that crash my explorer.

Then I must look into the registry to disable stuff.

if an ini is possible it is just open it and edit it very easy.

Thanks for this hard work.

You are pulling out new versions almost every day.

Nice to see to progress.

[WildBill]

I downloaded vmware player, but I have no idea how to create a virtual Win2k installation with it. How would I set up a VM that simulates two cpu's?

Edit: never mind. I found some instructions, but apparently vmware can't simulate two cpu's on a single-processor system. That means that I won't be able to do any multiprocessor testing to find out how to fix the problem. I have a hunch as to where to look, but no way to do the testing I would have to perform to make it work.

Edited June 14, 2009 by WildBill

[WildBill]

I posted version 0.9.6, which I *hope* will help, but admittedly it's a guess. I think the problem might be when overriding Windows API calls, as according to Microsoft memory accesses aren't atomic when there is more then one CPU (or CPU core). So when overriding the API (or restoring it back to the original), I first set the process affinity to use only one CPU/core (whichever is the first one specified in the mask that Windows returns). Then I restore it when finished. Processes will still use all cores, but not in that critical period when overriding or restoring API calls. At least, this is what I hope will happen, but I don't have a means to test it. All I can say is that it's had no adverse effect on my single-processor system.

[Tihiy]

Use FlushInstructionCache instead/with affinity hacking.

Although I'm almost sure CPU cache isn't an issue. First SmoothText versions (without object-oriented junk) worked well for me, with dual core CPU and even Windows XP.

[Tripo]

Use FlushInstructionCache instead/with affinity hacking.

Although I'm almost sure CPU cache isn't an issue. First SmoothText versions (without object-oriented junk) worked well for me, with dual core CPU and even Windows XP.

witch versions does work well for you.

[Tihiy]

Pre-0.3, i think.