Re: What's gemX ?

["C.P.Briscoe-Smith" <cpbs@ukc.ac.uk>]

Theo Janssen wrote:
>Hi there !
>
>I found an archive called "gemX.tar.gz" on ftp.fu-berlin.de.
>There's no readme or an other file, which could give some
>hints on what it is. I even was not able to compile the stuff.
>( missing library :-) )
>Seem's it's from Simon. Hi Simon, are you there ? What is it ?
>
>           cheerio Theo

Hi!

Well, I've downloaded it and tried it out, and I can get it to compile
on SunOS 4.1.3 if I make a few changes.  (Not the ST, since I haven't
got MiNT-X installed properly yet).  Trouble is, once I've done that,
the resulting executable doesn't work.  :-(  (X protocol error from
Xlib almost immediately).

>From looking at the source, I've worked out that it's a GEM emulator
for X.  It's a library that you call with GEM calls, and it calls Xlib
to produce the same effect on an X server as the AES would've done on
an ST.

There seems to be most of the AES and quite a lot of the VDI
implemented here, but buggy.  (I found a couple of bugs already, and
I'm no coding wizard).  When I single-stepped the program under gdb, I
could see it drawing a desktop window, and several GEM-style windows
inside that before it got an X protocol error.

It could be brilliant, but it needs working on.  Maybe it could also be
adapted into an AES/VDI-trap catching TSR thingy, to make existing GEM
programs work under MiNT-X?

--
Charles Briscoe-Smith
3rd Year student of Computer Science
University of Kent at Canterbury, United Kingdom, European Union.
World Wide Web:  http://aurora.etsiig.uniovi.es:3080/~~pippin/