Pearl Tiger "update personality" bugged out? + other patching bug?

[frosty76]

Sorry if this has been covered but I've had a good search and can't find it anywhere.

I've got problems with patching and personalities on our Pearl Tiger. Loving the desk - ridiculous step up from the DJ bits I'd played with before, but so much to learn and two big problems just now:

Firstly "update personality" doesn't seem to work - when I tried even with a virginal avolites personality it starts processing the update, then throws an error that it can't open it and exits having trashed the patched personalities for all that type of fixture - they're still there in the universe but the channel labels are all gone along with the Locate settings and palettes.

Repatching the fixture becomes my only option and after losing all my practise memories I was pretty happy with I'm a bit grumpy. Does this just not work? How am I meant to update a personality?
I'm trying to work out the patch for some undocumented lights so it's taking me a few passes and this makes it very tedious.

Secondly (and I must clarify this is unrelated to the first, as that still goes wrong with fresh .r20's) the undocumented light patches fine but when I delete it I am left with a dimmer channel in the +10 channel that is unassigned to anything. I can overwrite this and delete it fine, but I don't understand why it's left there. I'm suspicious it's because I've not used all the possible channels this light will take in the personality - it's 11 channels but 9/10 are useless in this context so I've just left them out - does this always cause problems? Due to the problem above I'm not currently in a big rush to try and see

Many thanks for any help!

[niclights]

I can't remember exactly but I'm fairly sure the update personality function in the Classic software is quite limited - perhaps just function ranges? So depending on the scope of changes from the original patched fixture it's conceivable that it would fail. Sorry that's a bit vague - someone else might be able to be more specific but in general I would try to ensure the patch is correct before you begin programming.

The second issue is not something that sounds familiar but certainly could be related to the gaps. While it should be ok to leave gaps normally you would have reserved channel(s).

[frosty76]

It was just an extra palette and an order change on another palette for the official personality, was trying to homogenise things across fixtures - I'll be more wary next time but it's frustrating as it seems a very useful feature.