[GEM Development] [GEM-DEV] GEM 32

[Ben A L Jemmett]

Quoting David Ormand <dlormand at smalltimer.net>:
> Any of the old-timers, was there ever an attempt to "standardize" the 
> build environment on something up-to-date or in common use?

Yes, -ish, in that John moved things he worked on (the AES and Desktop, notably)
to the Pacific C environment.  I believe this alleviated a lot of the
restrictions imposed by DRI's original build systems (a mixture of Lattice and
Metaware compilers, plus their own MASM86 and LINK86 and maybe others!),
although I could be wrong; it certainly led to 'cleaner' code, from memory.  I
tended to leave my versions of things in the original environment, mainly
because I'm heavily nostalgia-driven *grin*

(As an aside, I was reminded of Pacific C recently when engaging in a little
tinkering on a PIC-based project; one of the highly-regarded C compilers for PIC
microcontrollers is the Hi-Tech PICC compiler.  It appears to be the same
Hi-Tech as wrote Pacific; they've recently been bought by Microchip.  Anyway.)

With regards a 32-bit GEM, it seems to me that we need to think not only about
the details of the platform itself but also applications.  Done right, I'm sure
we could continue to run existing 16-bit GEM applications; but they would still
suffer from any limitations they currently have!  For instance, GEM Paint would
still end up with the incredible shrinking canvas, and since the object tree
format is heavily baked in then we couldn't provide them with more than 16
colours in the UI, etc.  Sources, sources, my kingdom for the sources!

So, to take advantage of the 32-bitness we need new (versions of) applications
-- I know there have been a few apps written for PC GEM in recent years, which
is (I guess!) a good starting point.  Perhaps we need to throw the question out
there: what would people writing apps want changed in a 32-bit version?

(It occurs to me, furthermore, that there is surely app development happening on
Atari GEM too; can the two divergent platforms be reconciled in such a way that
we'd be able to easily port any free/open code from Atari-land?)

Right, that's Sunday morning coffee and pondering done with, back to trying to
coax my new AS/400 into life...

-- 
Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett.
http://flatpack.microwavepizza.co.uk/

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