There are several things you can do to free up some memory in order to
access the paint tools. Depending on your system configuration, any or all
of these tips might help:
1) Turn off memory-hungry INITs and CDEVs. SoundMaster can take up a
huge amount of memory if you are using large sound files. ColorDesk is
another CDEV that can take up a large amount of RAM. After turning off
or moving INITs and CDEVs out of the System folder, restart your
computer; you should find that you have more memory now in which to
work.
2) If you're using System software version 6, run HyperCard under Finder
instead of MultiFinder.
3) Turn off the RAM cache via the Control Panel; HyperCard doesn't use it
anyway. At the least, lessen the amount of the RAM cache.
4) Allocate more memory to HyperCard via the Finder: click on the
HyperCard application (while it's not running), choose Get Info from the
File menu, and increase the amount of the application memory size. The
absolute minimum is 1000K; if you're having memory problems, try
increasing the amount by 256K increments until you are able to use the
paint tools. If your stack has a script that opens a large color PICT
file, you may need to increase it up to 2000K. This will allow things
within HyperCard to run more smoothly. Remember, if you're running
HyperCard with increased memory and you try to open another application
under MultiFinder, you may not have enough to open the second program.
If you open the second one from the desktop, you'll get a "Not enough
memory" message. If you try and open a second one via a script, nothing
will happen.
5) Remember to put "" (or empty) into large variables when you're done with
them. This is more important for systems with 1MB of RAM. Also bear in
mind that you needn't use many variables when one will do: rather than
using variables called name, sex, and age, you can put all four into
one variable like this:
put "Bob Jones" into line 1 of singleVariable
put "Male" into line 2 of singleVariable
put "04/13/63" into line 3 of singleVariable
You can then reference an item in the variable by referring to "line 2
of singleVariable".
6) Install more RAM in your system (if you do this, you can probably
skip all of the above steps.)
This article is adapted from the Claris Tech Info database.
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