Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Need BlackBerry 4.5 Simulator to start with app-param JvmDebugLocks enabled?

For some reason when running the BlackBerry 4.5 simulator (downloaded just a couple months ago), you may have some trouble setting app-param JvmDebugLocks that enables debugging of locks for concurrency.  JvmDebugLocks is a nice feature, because it detects interlocks among other things.  Well, if you add the text "/app-param=JvmDebugLocks" in your simulator startup script (such as defaultSimulator.bat), unfortunately the simulator may not start.  It will give a JVM error and complain about net_rim_font_system.cod in the simulator log file (such as 8300.xml-(YYYY-MM-DD).log).  Note that I'm not referring to the BlackBerry solution described here about specifying a language for your simulator, because recent simulators should come already with a valid language entry.  Instead, Platform.alx seems to have missing font files specified.  Open Platform.alx and change net_rim_font_system.cod to net_rim_font_latin_truetype.cod everywhere in the file.  That is assuming you're using a Latin font; otherwise change it to whichever file you want to use from your Java subfolder of simulator.  Start the simulator again and you should be good to go.
Copyright 2011 by William Cain