As we all know that the best computers in the world are c64 and c128. They have their GUI too - excellent GEOS. GEOS seems very difficult and cryptic for many people, from programmer's point of view. That's not true. The designers of GEOS created flexible and powerful system, which is easy to use and program.
Coding GEOS in C? That's something new. It is possible now - with Ulrich von Bassewitz's cc65 package and my GEOSLib you are able to create GEOS applications in no-time.
GEOSLib in its current stage doesn't support standard cc65 libraries. It is likely to be changed
in next version. Note that it doesn't mean that it will not work now. I didn't bother myself to
check if it is possible. All I needed for a start was including only geos.h
in the source
and nothing else.
I am an assembler programmer and GEOSLib was designed in such way that cc65 could emit the best
available code (well, the best as for machine :). Many of the void foo (void)
functions are
just raw calls to Kernal (assembled just as jsr _foo
), look in gsym.h
, where you
will find many definitions of standard GEOS locations. Access to these addresses is optimized by
cc65 to simple lda
and sta
.
You will not need c64 or c128 for development. The only hardware requirement is a PC capable of runing cc65. You will however need c64 or c128 emulator and GEOS image disks (.d64) to test your programs.
The software needed:
VICE and cc65 are portable - they run on variety of platforms - DOS, Win32 and UNIX. GEOSLib only needs cc65.
Update: starting from v2.5.0 GEOSLib is a part of cc65 package as its GEOS support.
I want to thank Uz for his cc65 package, Alexander Boyce for his excellent GEOS Programmer's Reference Guide and BSW for GEOS.
GEOSLib is covered by the same license as cc65. You can find the whole text among documentation. I would really appreciate if you would like to send me your comments, suggestions, questions, changes, bug reports etc. I feel that GEOSLib may be much better. After all, this is the first release. I will also appreciate if you will just give me a sign that you are using GEOSLib - not especially something big and important, mail me even if you are just playing with it.
You can send postcards with hellos to:
Maciej Witkowiak, ul. Slowackiego 6/57, 77-400 ZLOTOW
POLAND
e-mail: ytm@elysium.pl