Windowing System

fuzzyman · Post by **fuzzyman** » Sat Dec 22, 2001 10:06 am

OK.... here it goes... i am very interested in starting to program a windowing system for the dreamcast..... My main Goals are to port over a word processor and internet application, i was just wondering if anyone could help me find a very basic windowing system and some apps for it..... i know the linux guys used twm but it looks like shit.... well any how if anyone has any help at all please let me know.... Also with porting software what is the best aproach to take..? and are standard libraries supported like Math.c etc? Well please please help me out as if you did this might very well turn out to make a Dreamcast a home computer...... for 59.99 you can't beat that, if it all gets off it's feet might even develope a simple print driver and give instrucutions on how to make a printer cable i am VERY serious about all this and willing to put time into it! so any info is good info! THANKS

fuzzyman · Post by **fuzzyman** » Sun Dec 23, 2001 11:49 pm

i guess no one is skilled eough to give sugestions?

choasforages · Post by **choasforages** » Mon Dec 24, 2001 3:55 am

i am not an advanced programer however, niether do i have a lot of expierence with dreamcast devlopement. however i am skilled with *nix varients. your
bet would be to take the already present linuxdc and customize it. from most of my experiences all you would have to do is find gpl'd software that you find favourible, recompile the code for the dc and it should work. for kicks, use a dc already running linux to compile for you new distro. for the printer, you would probably need the bba and a print server. as for my recomendations for the window maneger i would have to say enlightenment or gnostep. i don't know if the dreamcast would be able to run enlightenment very fast. if you were to mod gnome(not ximian's version they slowed it down too much) heavily that would be even better

Sanchez · Post by **Sanchez** » Mon Dec 24, 2001 10:39 am

[quote="fuzzyman"]
i guess no one is skilled eough to give sugestions?
[/quote]

Just a word of advice, if you're asking for help, don't insult the people you're asking.

Consider the fact that a good deal of the people in this group follow the old rule of "if you don't have anything good to say...." and that might tell you why your responses have been few.

As for the windowing system, the reason twm was used is due to the 2MB limitation on programming under LinuxDC. If you want to look at something interesting, take a look at DCGrendel's iKOS/JAM/etc stuff. Pretty sweet looking and probably does most of what you're after anyway.

Bigboy · Post by **Bigboy** » Mon Dec 24, 2001 4:15 pm

Write your own window system - they are in fact very easy to do if you sit down and think about it. I did one a while back for debugging, and to show why windows way of doing things was crap. Much to my surprise, I ended up with a very windows/Amiga way of doing things. It only took a weekend to get tyhe basic window in window think running, and a couple more days for buttons etc... Try it, you'll be surprised how easy it is when its done right.

As for printers... just get a BBA and print to a network printer. you'll need a TCP/IP stack, theres a few around you could port.

If your dead set on doing this yourself fine.... but Since there IS a Linux, then why noy just port a Linux WordProcessor over to DC? you could do a custom boot disk that just boots up and runs the WP?

Bplay36971 · Post by **Bplay36971** » Thu Jan 03, 2002 8:56 pm

Would it be easier to use the palm opperating system instead of windows since it is smaller?

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun Jan 06, 2002 9:21 am

OK, I'm gonna get flamed for this one, but I personally don;t like Linux. It's way too big when fully set up, and it has way too much overhead. So do Windows and MacOS, so it's not that uncommon. LinuxDC is just not feasible in my opinion. The DC's hardware is too limited to run a complete PC operating system, including X-Windows and all of that stuff. Maybe an OS written for the DC from the ground up would be better.

Anyway, my advice is to write your own windowing system. It's not too hard to do, especially if it's primarily for a word processor etc... Maybe use a subset of KallistiOS functions, and write your own windowing API on top of it. I've done a similar thing in an OpenGL game I wrote, and a DC could handle it with no hassle.

kRYPT_ · Post by **kRYPT_** » Sun Jan 06, 2002 11:23 am

Linux is big?
I've got a secret hint for ya.. don't install X. The command line is your friend.

It makes linux around 150-200mb .. which is really not that much, considering that it's a very usable multi-user, multi-tasking OS.

BlackAura wrote: OK, I'm gonna get flamed for this one, but I personally don;t like Linux. It's way too big when fully set up, and it has way too much overhead. So do Windows and MacOS, so it's not that uncommon. LinuxDC is just not feasible in my opinion. The DC's hardware is too limited to run a complete PC operating system, including X-Windows and all of that stuff. Maybe an OS written for the DC from the ground up would be better.

Anyway, my advice is to write your own windowing system. It's not too hard to do, especially if it's primarily for a word processor etc... Maybe use a subset of KallistiOS functions, and write your own windowing API on top of it. I've done a similar thing in an OpenGL game I wrote, and a DC could handle it with no hassle.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Mon Jan 07, 2002 12:03 am

Yes, that's fine on a PC, but that's still a lot of stuff to put on a Dreamcast.

Don't get me wrong, Linux is definitely one of the better PC operating systems, but, like all PC operating systems, it has a lot of stuff that's redundant or unnecessary. Windows is far worse for being filled up with crap, but I can actually use the thing sometimes. Maybe I might like Linux more if I could get the thing working perfectly on any of my PCs. I would love to chuck windows in the bin. One day, perhaps, but not today, I'm afraid.

Heliophobe_ · Post by **Heliophobe_** » Tue Jan 08, 2002 1:36 pm

One of the key advantages of Linux is that you can strip it clean of anything you don't want in it, and keep it as lean as possible... unfortunately, people only seem to want to use it on the Dreamcast as a general purpose desktop OS, and that tends to bloat a linux distribution.

fuzzyman · Post by **fuzzyman** » Tue Jan 08, 2002 11:13 pm

OK... I have not been around for a while but something struck me... then i came back here and saw my idea again.... PALM...

THere is source code for a palm emulator out there.. and if i am wrong the OS itself runs on like 23mhz processors.... there are about 10,000 palm program out there and it mightjust work.....

Now the question is... what resembles Kalisto OS linux or windows what source should i try to port from...?