Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to GEM?

dfarq.homeip.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 85 posts

Re: What happened to GEM?

#51

Post by cmrdporcupine »

car wrote: post #46
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle. Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from t…

Is the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.

People attempted to patch the routines decades ago and it never produced a stable result.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#52

Post by pjmlp »

igravious wrote: post #43
pjmlp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DR-DOS 5 was alright and Viewmax a nice way to manage files and directories.

DR-DOS was more than alright, if Microsoft hadn't smothered it the computing world would look very very different today … I'm sure this is a mostly forgotten part of computing lore; apologies for the Gemini's Overview: “Microsoft actively stifled DR-DOS in the early 1990s through anti-competitive tactics, primarily using the "AARD code" in Windows 3.1, which deliberately created compatibility errors to scare users aw…

Yeah we know of the issues, and related lawsuits, and here we are OEMs still only sell GNU/Linux devices on their online shops, leaving to regular consumer stores Android, WebOS and Chromebooks.

Ah, and Valve had to come up with Proton, as game studios can't be bothered to natively target GNU/Linux.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#53

Post by einr »

zabzonk wrote: post #9
ayaros wrote: post #8

There's now a version of GEM you can run on a Lisa. But 68KMLA is down so I have no easy way to link to the relevant thread. :(

Whoo, has anyone actually got a working Lisa? Or is this emulation?

There are a lot of working Lisas out there.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#54

Post by cmrdporcupine »

car wrote: post #49
car wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.

Going down this rabbit hole, I realize that ST hardware for musicians is still huge. And the dongles as still working as intended, apparently. And then this blew my mind: https://re-falcon.com Quite the underground scene: https://indyclassic.org

I have two Falcons here they're a compelling machine and still fun to play with.

But if I were to ask for a machine repro, a new motherboard, it would be in a different PCB form factor to get it into an ITX or m-ITX case. Because it's the cases and keyboards that go, not the machine.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#56

Post by einr »

zabzonk wrote: post #55
einr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of working Lisas out there.

But there weren't too many Lisas (working or otherwise) when the thing came out!

Well OK, "a lot" can mean a lot of different things depending on context ;)

In the vintage computer collector/enthusiast scene, there are probably dozens of working Lisas. How's that?

Re: What happened to GEM?

#57

Post by lproven »

I wonder why GEM is back on bloggers' radar again? Last September, Nemanja Trifunovic did a good in-depth history, here:

https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...

He missed out on the recent history of the environment, and at the time, I wrote a blog post adding more info on what happened next:

https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/96552.html

You do mention OpenGEM and FreeGEM, but not what's in them. They re-added all the features DR removed after the Apple lawsuit. They also added the features from GEM/4 and GEM/5 which John Elliot documented:

https://www.seasip.info/Gem/

There were also other branches of GEM. DR did several...

• ViewMax, which was bundled with DR-DOS 5 and 6. This had Windows-style keyboard controls and could operate and manage DR-DOS's built-in multitasker, TaskMax.

• It also was working on GEM/XM which offered multitasking on plain old DOS.

• X/GEM ran on DR's RTOS, FlexOS. This was the realtime offshoot of DR Concurrent CP/M and Concurrent DOS: a family of full, native, protect-mode, multitasking DOS-compatible OSes for the PC, and 286s, and 386s. FlexOS is multitasking and so is X/GEM.

Some of the code from FreeGEM made its way back into ST GEM. There is a complete multitasking FOSS OS for the Atari ST and compatibles, called AFROS. It targets its own emulator, Aranym.

https://aranym.github.io/

It originally had a minimal stub ROM replacement to boot the emulator: the OS is a native multitasking one so does not need much from Atari's ROM, which is not FOSS anyway. Atari's ROM is not just a BIOS: it contains the whole OS – the BIOS, and GEMDOS on top, and GEM on top of that.

But the community took that stub ROM and upgraded it to a fullly FOSS replacement for Atari TOS. In other words, with a replacement for GEMDOS and a replacement for GEM. That GEM replacement is partly built from FreeGEM code.

It's a lot of life for a long-dead desktop. I think some of this deserved a mention bigger than a single sentence.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#58

Post by lproven »

zabzonk wrote: post #7
TMWNN wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not so sure about this. WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.

Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time.

> who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good

I dunno man. I came from a ZX Spectrum (via several other machines, it's true) and compared to that, the ST keyboard was great.

Re: What happened to GEM?

#59

Post by lproven »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #11
TMWNN wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not so sure about this. WordPerfect and Spectrum Holobyte explicitly cited software piracy as being worse on ST than on other platforms.

I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST. WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop? Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.

> I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?

There was a port of MS Word, and it worked well. For some strange historical reasons I can't recall now, though, it was called and marketed as MS Write instead.

Write was the extremely basic free wordprocessor in Windows 3.x -- and so the name did the ST version a grave disservice.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/microsoftwrite.html

Re: What happened to GEM?

#60

Post by lproven »

msephton wrote: post #30
TMWNN wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly Nothing with the power of WordPerfect. Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known. WordPerfect beat them all . Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.

My favourite was Protext (Arnor) which was an old school mostly keyboard-centric word processor, rather than anything like DTP. Crazy powerful. It was originally Amstrad CPC, but later released on Atari ST, MS-DOS, Amiga, Archimedes and even more bespoke hardware like the Amstrad NC.

Did you know Protext is freeware now?

https://www.aptanet.org/protext/

I do a bootable DOS system on a live USB key and it includes Protext. :-)

https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

Post reply on HN