[GEM Development] Newcomer with firsts questions...

[francois.vanzeveren at brutele.be]

Hi all

I am new on this mailing list and a rookie with INTEL based 
GEM...
But, as a former atari st user, I am not completely ignorant 
of GEM.

Unfortunatelly, today, I do not have an atari anymore to play 
with and satisfy my desire of retro-computing/programming. So 
now, I am succesfully running "modern" GEM environments 
(FreeMint + MyAES) with  Aranym under Linux... And this is 
very cool! The level of compatibility is amazing (actually, 
Aranym emulate a real M68040 as well as the DSP 58001)
I even started to learn C and GEM programming with the 
fantastic book C-MANSHIP from Walnum Clayton (late 80's), 
adapting the listings to AHCC, a full C developpment 
environment for Atari and Atari Clones which is still actively 
maintained.

Of course, I have been around looking to buy some secondhand 
atari (ideally a Falcon030 or a TT030), because emulation is 
not the real thing... You know, the feeling you are 
working/playing with the real thing, without intermediary. But 
prices seem to have risen up to insane levels...

Fortunatelly, last week, I discovered the INTEL based GEM... 
and saw an opportunity to take out my first PC (a toshiba 
satellite 220CS) out of the cupboard and (maybe) make it my 
main GEM development platform...

Last WE, I succesfully installed OpenGEM 6 over FreeDOS, DJGPP 
as development environment (PacifiC does not seem to like 
pentium I processors). Note that I thought that it was 
hopeless when compiling a very basic "Hello World" just 
pathetically failed... Until I discovered that gcc 4.6x are 
now incompatible with Pentium I processors. Going back to 
version 4.44 and my environment was up and running :)

Since then, I successfully adapted the listings of chapter 10 
and 11 of the CMANSHIP book to run under my brand new 
environment :)

Nevertheless, I am continuously getting the following warnings 
from DJGPP (I installed the DJGPP GEM bindings from the 
OpenGEM SDK release 3):

c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:156: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:167: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:176: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:192: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:211: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:223: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:230: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:230: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:236: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:236: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:247: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:261: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:268: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:291: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:344: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored
c:\djgpp\contrib\gem\include/obdefs.h:367: warning: 'packed' 
attribute ignored

So, here are my first questions: 
* Should i worry about these warnings?
* Could them cause issues in more complex applications I could 
do in the future? 
* How to solve them?

Best regards

François.