On 03/12/1997 at 7:24 PM -0500, you wrote:

> What I'm really afraid of here is a known bug in the 68LC040 chip.
> Apparently, the author of SoftwareFPU ran into this

Check the SoftwareFPU docs... The bug only exists in early 68LC040s. I'd
hazard a guess that most of them out there don't have the problem. I don't
use SoftwareFPU, but I remember that the author gave a chip version number
so that you could check whether or not your 68LC040 was of the broken or
the fixed variety.

My 68LC040 was of the newer, fixed variety, but your concern is an
interesting one that i haven't considered before. I don't believe that
there's a programmatic way to determine the chip's version number, but I
might be wrong.

BTW: Does anyone have a spare LC040-based machine they could loan Allen
Briggs? He posted about this a week or so ago, but I didn't see any
replies. He's offered to fix the FPE problem, but he doesn't have a machine
on which to do testing, which sort of limits what he's able to do right
now. (My main machine has a 68LC040, but I'd rather not send that out if I
can avoid it, given that it's a network server in addition to being my
personal machine. I will if I have to, but surely someone out there has a
spare machine sitting in a closet... You'd be doing the world a favour by
loaning it to Allen, and he's already offered to pay shipping one way for
whomever sends him a machine. He's also offered to install NetBSD/Mac on
the machine on which he works, although I think it would be more fun to
bull through the problems myself.)

Later...

--
        Mason Loring Bliss    /\    mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us
      PGPKeyID: 0x25B3D5B5   /()\   awake ? sleep() : dream();
http://www.four.net/~mason  /    \  Squeak to me of love!