[GEM Development] GEM Setup

[John Elliott]

  One of the things that's rather annoying about the original GEM/3 setup
program is that it insists on installing from floppies, and that the 
floppies in question must have the right disk labels.

  The other day I happened to find the source code for it (it's in the 
System Builder Kit download at <http://www.deltasoft.com/downloads.htm> )
and wondered how possible it would be to 

i)  Get it compiling with Pacific C, and 
ii) Make it capable of installing from a directory rather than a set of
   floppies.

  The answer: Well, it seems to work on my machine.

<http://www.seasip.info/Gem/setup.html> has:

* Pacific C source for the modified GEMSETUP;
* A sample distribution of GEM/3 with the new setup program;
* A sample distribution of FreeGEM with the new setup program.

  Compared to the original, the new GEMSETUP:

* Can install from a hard drive directory, which was the point of the 
 exercise. I think extra driver disks would still have to be floppies, 
 though.

* Supports custom screen colours (specified in GEMSETUP.MSG).

* Supports 32 drives rather than 16.

* Can install DRI GEM/3 or FreeGEM (this is a compile-time option). 

* Various tweaks to video hardware detection.

  There's still a lot that could be done with the setup program if 
anyone felt like it. In particular, there are various hardcoded paths 
which should really be made user-enterable, and the list of non-driver 
files to install is hardcoded rather than stored in GEMSETUP.TXT.

-- 
John Elliott