[GEM Development] Shane Land GEMini 3 further details

[Shane M. Coughlan]

>I see. Wouldn't it have made more sense to pass any such reports on to the 
>mailing list here, so that the authors of the FreeGEM code could try to fix 
>the problems, rather than simply throwing away all the work of the FreeGEM 
>community for several years? I don't recall seeing any such bug reports.

Well, around the time of OpenGEM 2.2.0 I posted some comments about 
problems.  We were left with an inconclusive result...it was hard to tell 
what was causing the problems (Windows DOS shells?  Application calls that 
were not supported?).  WRITE.APP, for instance, cannot save files if it's 
used on a modern Windows system.  So perhaps a lot of the issues are to do 
with Windows shells?

I certainly don't wish to lose the progress of the FreeGEM community, 
because the steps forward have been very nice.  Ben's desktop has that nifty 
drive detection idea, the 3D support is nice.  John's desktop is very simple 
and stable with the nice trashcan.  What I do want to do is create a basic 
release of OpenGEM that is rock solid, and to create options for people to 
try the other code if they wish.  This is a much more end-user focused 
approach I think...the user who downloads the basic set gets (mostly) 
commerically tested code.  The user with a greater interest in playing can 
get lots of options that can be easily installed onto the system.

Regards

Shane