[GEM Development] OpenGEM Project Liberation Beta1

[John Elliott]

: Hi!!
: 
: Today I tried the new OpenGEM Liberation. It looks very good and the drives 
: detection work without Problems on my Pent166/Win98SE System (btw. can it 
: also detect Network drives?). Good work.
: One question: The window opening animation seems to be a bit slow. Is it 
: possible to make it a little bit faster?

  Ah. The window animation.

  In the original GEM, the animation didn't have any sort of speed
regulation at all. It ran as fast as the CPU could draw it, which was 
fine for 8086s but not for anything much faster than that. Using the 
standard 55ms timer made it too slow, so it busy-waits. It works out how
many calls to dos_getticks() it can do in a second, and then uses that to 
delay 1/91 of a second at each stage of the animation. This worked fine on
DRDOS where I originally wrote it.

  The problem, of course, is that when you're running in a DOS box on a 
more recent OS, the system's idle detection cuts in and throws the timing 
completely off. On NT, I've found that disabling idle detection on GEM.EXE
(or was it GEMVDI.EXE?) helps; alternatively, moving the mouse about while
GEM is displaying a blank white screen with an hourglass in the centre 
seems to baffle the idle detection mechanism.

-- 
John Elliott