TRiLOGI I/O Table displaying garbled image

[support]

Some users who have their java upgraded to JRE 1.6 face a problem that the RELAY table and sometime certain range of other I/O tables display garbled image instead of proper I/O label. One example is as shown below:



We have so far determined that this problem is caused by either a bug in the JRE 1.6 or a bug in the Windows XP Direct X driver.  Hence the problem seems to occur only to a small number of users of Windows XP SP2 or SP3 (most who reported similar problem are using Dell PCs). When the user uninstalls JRE 1.6 and re-install JRE 1.4.2 that are shipped with the i-TRiLOGI software the problem would disappear immediately.

Further testing on a system that we have come across showed that if you disable the Hardware Accelerator in the DirectX 3D driver the problem would also disappear. What you need to do is to go to the Control Panel and find the DirectX driver (if there is one), open it up, click on "Direct 3D" tab, then uncheck the "Allow Hardware Accelerator" check box. Then click "OK". Restart i-TRiLOGI and check the RELAY table to see if the entire table will be displayed properly.


That is to say, if you face similar problem, you can either:

1) Downgrade JRE 1.6 to earlier version, or
2) Disable hardware accelerator in the Direct X driver.

So far all users who faced similar issue as described above have managed to resolve it by downgrading to JRE 1.4.2. If you prefer to keep JRE 1.6 then you can try to disable hardware acceleration in the Direct X or try disabling some hardware settings in the Direct X driver. Please email support@tri-plc.com if you manage to solve the problem with other methods.
 
TIPS

One of our users Mr  Brian Sorbe has kindly provided the following tip for launching the Direct X settings window:

"Typically on XP machines, the easiest way to launch the directx settings is to simply press start, run, and type in 'dxdiag' and that launches the direct x mod page."

For users who must keep the JRE 1.6 (probably because some applications require JRE 1.6 and will not work on 1.4.2) but encountered the garbled I/O table issue, please try to disable the Direct3D hardware acceleration to eliminate the problem.

[support]

Sun Microsystem (owner of Java) has now archived the JRE 1.4.2 with the last build number being  #19 and they have moved the setup file to their archive folder. However, we still find JRE 1.4.2 the most stable Java version to work with the i-TRiLOGI and most of the new problems that users encounter seems to be caused by problems in the newest JRE and often are resolved with a downgrade to JRE 1.4.2.

If you wish to downgrade to JRE 1.4.2 and make it a default JRE, then please uninstall the JRE 1.6.x in your PC first, and download the JRE 1.4.2 from:

   http://java.sun.com/products/archive/j2se/1.4.2_19/index.html

TIPS - Please see the next post on how to keep both JRE 1.4.2 and JRE 1.6 in your PC and how to ensure that only JRE 1.4.2 will be used to start the i-TRiLOGI and/or TLServer.

[support]

A user who experienced similar display problem, but whose O/S does not allow the DirectX accelerator to be turned OFF, and he is not willing to downgrade the JRE to 1.4.2 since some of his other applications require JRE 1.6.0. So we suggested the following solutions:

1) Go ahead to install the JRE 1.4.2 regardless of whether the current O/S has JRE 1.6.0.

2) Next, locate the folder location of the JRE 1.4.2. It is by default installed in a folder similar to the following:

C:\Program Files\Java\j2re1.4.2_06  (if installed from the CD), or
C:\Program Files\Java\j2re1.4.2_19  (if downloaded from Sun website)

3) Open the TRiLOGI folder, default is:

     C:\TRiLOGI\TL6

4) Right-click the folder space and select "New->Text Document". A "New Text Document.txt" will be created. Rename it as : TL6new.bat

5) Right-click the file "TL6new.bat" and select "Edit", then enter the following lines into the file (if you are using TRiLOGI 6.3x and JRE 1.4.2 build 6)


"c:\Program Files\java\j2re1.4.2_06\bin\java.exe" -jar TL63.jar
pause

or,  if you are using TRiLOGI 6.4x and JRE 1.4.2 build 19, then enter the following lines:

"c:\Program Files\java\j2re1.4.2_19\bin\java.exe" -jar TL64.jar
pause



6) Save the file and quit.

7) Now double-click the TL6new.bat file and the TRiLOGI program should start.

If it doesn't work, make sure that the path info of the JRE 1.4.2 and the correct TL6x.jar file name is specified. The pause statement inserted after the execution line is to prevent the DOS command prompt window from closing if the command failed and you can then read the error messages to find out what was wrong in your command line.

8) You can of course make a desktop short cut for the TL6new.bat file so that you can simply double-click on your desktop to start i-TRiLOGI driven by JRE 1.4.2.

9) You can do the same for TLServer. After this exercise your TRiLOGI and TLServer will always be run by JRE 1.4.2 regardless of any automatic updates to the JRE 1.6 by the O/S. We find that JRE 1.4.2 is the most stable JRE for use with i-TRiLOGI and TLSErver.

[support]

We have just released i-TRiLOGI 6.41 with TLServer 3.16. Besides adding some new features to the programming editor, we have also addressed the issue that JRE 1.4.2_19 appears to work better with i-TRiLOGI.

What we do is to encourage the user to install the JRE 1.4.2_19 regardless of any other JRE version that is already on the PC. We have developed the TL6launcher.exe program such that it will check for the existence of the JRE 1.4.2_19 in either the C:\Program Files\Java folder or the "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java" folder (used by W7 64-bit version).

If JRE 1.4.2_19 is found the TL6Launcher.exe program will automatically invoke it to run the TL64.jar java program. However, if JRE 1.4.2_19 is not found then it will invoke whatever default JRE in the user PC to run i-TRiLOGI.

With this scheme, the user is free to install any other JRE versions needed to run other Java programs but i-TRiLOGI will ignore them and continue to use only the JRE 1.4.2_19.