System error #25 at FFC9747A _Jackson
They're everywhere apparently... Macintosh error codes in Marathon that is. As Leela began to succumb to the relentless attack of the S'pht (Compilers) she spewed out increasing amounts of garbaged text. Some of this included bona fide Macintosh error codes. This section attempts to identify them.
The first Macintosh error code was found by Randall Shaw <rms8254@imap1.asu.edu> back in April '97. Randall opened his Note Pad and BOOM he got a System error #25 at FFC9747A _Jackson.
This is in fact a line from a terminal on "Never Burn Money"
~~hen she had it just so the room flickered and tore, bending
into somewhere else: ~~~ffs`~~~~f~~~[system error #25 at
_Jackson]~~~~%*|\]~``se which she caused to be consumed by an
ashless fire.<Never Burn Money (Terminal 4)>
Randall explained how he got it:
connect via ot/ppp 1.1.2, open emailer, open ircle, read mail message from seig, talk in irc, open mesage from seig and then copy all the mail, then opened notepad... second goes by before i get a chance to do anything and it pops up macsbug with error
You can read the gory details in his MacsBug's log here.
Chad Poland <proedge@mindspring.com> quotes from the Apple Tech Info Library:
The meaning of System Error 25 is often listed as "out of memory". It is usually an indication that the stack has temporarily overrun the heap and the computer should be restarted.The _Jackson is an abbreviated label for _JacksonPollack. Jackson Pollack was the development name for the ColorQuickDraw project and this area of ROM contains routines of Color QuickDraw.
Steven Ryan <smryan@mail.com> writes concerning this line:
<unimplemented inline trap $A9FF>
on "Smells Like Napalm, Tastes Like Chicken!" (Terminal 2)
On the 68K Macs, instructions A000-AFFF are undefined by the hardware and used to jump to operating system routines (the a-traps). If you use new software on old systems, you can get these.
Steven Ryan <smryan@mail.com> writes further on the above error code:
In particular, trap A9FF (Debugger()) passes control from the program to MacsBug. I guess someone forgot to remove some debugging code.
Steven also identifies some new ones. On Never Burn Money we read
settled in a pile on ~~~~4*)Steven explains:
where she had been standing.<'scod BFB1 0002'+1Ad2>
14 seven hundred miles away, eyes on fire, tearing at her<Never Burn Money (Terminal 4)>
The Inside Macintosh manuals don't explain what 'scod' resources are. If you hit the interrupt button (or the Programmer's Key) while running MPW, you find 'scod BFB1 0002' is being called by the console reader:Calling chain using A6 links:
ConsRead+000E2Patch code?
ReadTillEnter+000AE
'scod BFB1 0002'+01A58
'scod BFB1 0002'+04A5C
et cetera
and on Welcome to the Revolution...
~:(((okg~~fx**eff~~~~~~~`
(`(((%_YLOEP&```~`*K
^:E
[raw core #A8AF] [idiomatic natural language template]<Welcome to the Revolution... (Terminal 2)>
Steven writes:
Trap A8AF (StdRRect) is used to draw rectangles in Quickdraw.