Build 10 Released

February 4, 2010 · Filed Under MeshCAM Development, MeshCAM Releases 

I’ve just ended the one of the more humbling events in MeshCAM development in a long time.  I got an email from Richard in Germany saying that he recently applied a WinXP update and MeshCAM now crashes immediately upon startup.  Build 5 worked but the later ones failed.  This is one of the most difficult cases to debug since it’s impossible to reproduce and I don’t have access to the machine.  Also, the change from Build 5 to Build 6 coincided with me getting a new laptop so I immediately assumed it was a problem with my build environment or related to the XP update.

Richard and I spent about a month trying various updates and tests to find the root cause.  By the second week of testing I was contacted by another user with similar problems so I began to get really worried.  Along the way I found a similar problem caused by a missing manifest file for the tbb.dll file that MeshCAM depends on, although this didn’t help Richard at all.   I was just about to have him dig into Dr Watson to get me a dump file when I though, “I should check out the blog to see what I was talking about near Build 5.”  Sure enough, I saw that I made the change to SSE2-only CPUs at this time and, sure enough, Richard had an Athlon XP CPU that lacked the necessary SSE2 support.

By now, I’ve wasted enough time with this (because I didn’t bother to read the blog) and I never want to deal with this again.  The new installer includes both SSE2 and non-SSE2 builds and will automatically install the right one when the installer is run.  I should have done this at the start but I really didn’t think that old CPUs would be commonly in use for higher-end applications like CAD/CAM.  My assumptions have failed me again but hopefully this will solve the problem for good.

Build 10 also include updated translations for Spanish, Japanese, and Russian.  The German translation is not ready yet so that will be build 11 which, if no bugs are reported, will become the “release version” of MeshCAM 3.

It would help if users could check the about dialog after install to see if there is the phrase, “No SSE2” is there.  It should not be there for Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 and newer chips.  P3, Athlon XP and older should show “No SSE2.”

As always, let me know what you find in this release.

http://www.grzsoftware.com/v2dl.php

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Comments

3 Responses to “Build 10 Released”

  1. Gerry on February 4th, 2010 2:18 pm

    According to the Change Log in the help file, in build 4 you made MeshCAM remember window size and position. It’s not working in build 10, and I don’t think it worked in build 8 either.

    Also, see the forum for a roughing bug I found in build 8.

  2. Robert on February 4th, 2010 8:35 pm

    The window size seems to be remembered for me. The one thing to note is that the last positions are deleted on each install. This was done as a backup in case garbage was written to the registry that caused MeshCAM to be placed off-screen. I try to detect this on program startup but the installer will still clear it so users have a last-resort to fix the potential problem.

    I’ll go look for the roughing bug now.

    -Robert

  3. Gerry on February 7th, 2010 7:14 am

    You’re right, the window size does work. Had a hdd failure, so it was a new install. I guess it needed a reboot to start working, but it’s working now.