[GEM Development] Desktop.inf

[Armand Colleye]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the quick reply.
The desktop app I am using is the FreeGem v6.
The info box of the Desktop says John Elliot and your name was absent :(

The story to the conclusion/question:

As I was mailing to the group I  am busy to create the GEM-CD as a 
virtual machine.

By adding (new) applications to it (via the Install application 
interface), some were not predefined.
So I add the application and on the fly add an appropiate icon to it via 
the Install application interface
E.g. for the games you can "sort" the games by its kind of game.
At entry 64 all games revert to its standard tic-tac-toe
AND the new application (not a game) had the same (tic-tac-toe) icon.

You can try revert this mishap via the deskop interface and save it (the 
desired situation).
But after a restart (The gem interface or reboot) you will be back on 
the same level, unless you revert via a text-editor to a number less 
than 64.

I hope my explanation is in line what you were explaining.

Regards
Armand

Op 20-11-2018 om 23:46 schreef Ben A L Jemmett:

Hi Armand,

Yes, that sounds right - the Desktop internally reads these into a list of ANODE structures, and it only allocates room for 64 of them.  It’s been many years since I last took a look at the details but if you need more, you should be able to alter the NUM_ANODES value defined in DESKAPP.H and rebuild the Desktop from source.

Taking a quick glance at the code in DESKAPP.C that handles finding the next free node, it doesn’t appear to check if it ran off the end of the list, which is unfortunate; I’m surprised it doesn’t crash in spectacular fashion after the 65th or 66th node!  It’s not quite as simple as a missing bounds check because it sets the pre-allocated array of structs up as a linked list and they can get shuffled around as nodes are allocated and freed, but that does mean it would in theory be possible to have the list grow dynamically if needed.  Regardless of the details, though, it would be nice to at least check the return value of the app_alloc() calls in app_start() to handle this more gracefully!

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

> On 20 Nov 2018, at 21:55, Armand Colleye <armand.colleye at planet.nl> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
>
> Is within desktop.inf a limit of 64 entries?
>
> All the icons get messed up when I reach 64 entries.
> -- 
>
> Met vriendelijke groet,
> With kind regards,
>
>
> Armand Colleye
>
>
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