Obey Files.. do I need these?

I am trying to figure out if I need these obey files on my Titanium. It’s been a few years and I was troubleshooting some startup issues on my Titanium.

ARPlayer
CPUSetup
DALimit (BASIC file)

I think they were in the PreDesk folder but it’s been a few years and I lost my notes that told me the folder they were removed from.

I found ARPlayer and DALimit in RO520Hook.Boot.Predesk so I think those are good. Just need to know where CPUSetup goes, if it’s even needed on a Titanium.

I think the xxxHook directories are templates that get copied into the normal boot sequence.

On my system, those three files are in !Boot.Choices.Boot.PreDesk.

ARPlayer simply sets a system variable to configure ARMovie… is this needed any more? Does anybody still use Replay?

DALimit sets clamps on the maximum size of Dynamic Areas to be 128MB, because some programs, rather than trying to work out how much DA space would be required, simply asked for -1 (unlimited). This was questionable practice on a RiscPC and something of a disaster on modern machines as there’s enough actual memory present nowadays to run out of address space.

CPUSetup configures two things.
On older processors, such as the original Pi, it sets up whether to perform a rotated load if the address is not word aligned, or a proper unaligned load.
On most current processors, it also sets up whether or not unaligned loads should throw an exception.

In the early days, it may have helped to allow rotated loads (the original ARM behaviour). This was then changed to having unaligned loads raise an exception, because there was a pretty good chance that any program trying to do so would be expecting rotated loads and would, therefore, not be doing the right thing (data corruption, etc).
These days, it is more usual to not throw an exception as some software performs unaligned loads and does it correctly – Iris is an example.

If that’s a bit too nerdy – you can double-click on !Boot (to run it), then click on the CPU option, and then choose either:

• ARMv7 strict mode
  or:
• ARMv7 fast mode
  If you use Iris, or other software that nags you about disabling alignment exceptions, then pick fast mode and it’ll stop nagging. ;)

Thanks Rick. I tried to run CPUSetup but it didn’t find the module in Configure, so it won’t run. On the Titanium I use AlignEx when I need to turn alignment exceptions off or on, which seems to work for me. Not nerdy at all. . I have run in to old software that required it. I do recall my Pi’s having the CPUSetup in Configure. Thanks for jogging my memory.