[GEM Development] GEM not going forward... Comments?

[Michael Bernstein]

Hello José Emilio Mori Recio,

> I've been waiting these weeks for news on OpenGEM 7,

Which news do you want to read? I think, PC-GEM is more or less
finished. For the applications exist no source code. So you have a
collection of all exisiting GEM applications. GEM istelf was
recompiled, the desktop was modified. And the paket includes all
existing VDI graphic drivers.

> and/or the fixing of the primary GEM Wiki, in order to open an account
> and begin to extend its information... but nothing has changed so far.

For development documentation, there is no need for a wiki. Because
Atari computers also use GEM as a gui, you can use the documentaton
about the TOS (operating system for Atari computer) as a refernce.
You can fin a online version in german at atari.mbernstein.de an in
english (not really all translated at this time) at toshyp.atari.org

This text was based on UDO (www.udo-open-source.org) as a meta language
and you can generate many other output formas. Because the text was
modular, it was easy to ad a additional target PC-GEM as output. The
use of this text will save your time for other projects and can help
a little bit, if you want to write GEM applications.

> I've seen this list has 91 members. I don't know how much interest is left
> on the project for all of us, but I would like to know.

I think, for most of them, the interest was gone.

> ... and I'll try my best to help keeping GEM alive.

But what should a user do with GEM? For most of the work with a PC, a
user will use a more modern OS which was capable to use all the
resources inside a modern PC. PC-GEM was limited to the 640 KB DOS
memory. in this memory should fit VDI, AES and your application. As far
as i remember, video graphics buffer was limited to 64 KB. So it
is a problem to use modern higher resolutions (and you have no VDI
graphic drivers).

You can take a look at Atari computers to see a possible way, in which
direction GEM can be expanded. With MiNT/N.AES/oAESis/XaAES and NVDI or
MagiC you have TOS (TOS is similar to DOS) which was expanded by
multitasking and some POSIX functionality. And the modern AES can
handle multitasking, has 3D look, ...

But for all this ideas, you will always have to problem of limited
resources under DOS.

So you need a good reason for someone to "play" with GEM. And you need
a direction for further development of GEM. Leave it as a DOS
application? Then maybe there was room for new graphics drivers? And
additional applications. Or make a jump to a system which can handle
more memory, maybe multitasking. In this case you can also take a look
to the Atari computer and try to port some applications.

I have set up a VMWare image with FreeDOS and GEM. So i need no old
PC or boot DOS instead of my main operating system. Maybe such a image
will help others to take a look at PC-GEM.

Best regards
Michael Bernstein