With all the questions and comments about running a mud on win 95 (most of
the negative comments coming from people who never had), I'll give some of
the insights and solutions we came up with when NergMUD was running on
win95 and then NT for 4 months.
First thing, running a mud on win95 is not a good idea unless you want to
reboot every day. Win95 loses stability after 12 to 24 hours depending on
your processor (faster processors lose stability faster). Win95 was never
meant to be run 24 hours a day and needs frequent rebooting to clear itself.
Only solution to this is to reboot on a regular basis or switch to NT which
was meant to run for long periods of time. This information came from
experience and the Microsoft Knowledge Base.
One thing to make sure of is to have as much physical memory in the machine
as the mud, windows, and any other processes running concurrently needs. Do
not rely on virtual memory, it will lag the mud and can cause crases as it's
switching things around. When we were on NT, we had 48 meg of memory, the
mud, OS, and processes required 42.
Now to a few questions:
>1) When my mud crashes, how come it doesn't automatically reboot? How
>can I make it so it will using Win95?
This is because when it crashed, it put a screen up telling you that there
was a problem and it the program was shut down. This screen requires you to
hit enter to continue, it will then reboot. Now, how to get rid of that
screen...In win95, we never got it to; we switched to NT. One solution to
this would be to write a quick windows app that switched to the top screen
(which is where the error screen would be) and send <enter>. Like I said,
we switched to NT since it was better and had fewer problems.
>2) When I run my mud a dos window holds the syslog information yet
>there is nothing in the syslog file. Also when the mud crashes I don't
>see a syslog.CRASH file telling me the errors...
The file was never written, so syslog.CRASH had nothing to be based on.
This is because win95 doesn't route output the same as linux. Solution to
this is to search for SYSERR and add a line below it that is the same except
sends to SYSOUT (maybe it's the other way around and stock is SYSOUT and you
need to add a line for SYSERR, been too long and I don't remember). This
will allow the log to be written as done on a linux system.
As an aside for this, because of the way windows (95 and NT) do file
processing, you will not be able to view this file while the mud is running.
It all comes down to this - win95 can be used to run a mud for testing,
coding and for the short term, but if you want it to be up 'for real' switch
to NT.
If anyone out there needs help with a windows based mud, I can offer
suggestions and ideas.
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