Programmer's Only

gateWay Source Code

When Click Here Software took over the Commodore business from Creative Micro Designs in 2001, the sale of the gateWay disk was discontinued. Actually, sales of gateWay had already diminished considerably since the initial release of Wheels in 1998. Since Wheels was introduced, there were only 3 gateWay 64 disks sold and only 4 gateWay 128 disks sold.

When the RAMLink was being developed, CMD needed a way to use the hardware with GEOS and to be able to boot GEOS from the RAMLink. CMD commissioned Paul Bosacki to write a new desktop environment that would run on top of GEOS and which could work with the RAMLink. This came to be known as "The gateWay". The first release of gateWay was intended to be supplied with the RAMLink. Later on, a new version of Configure was included with the RAMLink instead. This allowed the standard GEOS deskTop to be used. CMD had sunk a great deal of money into the development of gateWay and so they needed to be able to offer it as a separate product. Soon, gateWay V2.0 was released and offered to the public. Users of the original version could upgrade for a small fee.

CMD then commissioned Jim Collette to further develop gateWay, to improve it, and to fix some bugs. This became V2.5 and was a big hit. CMD sold enough copies of gateWay to recoup their investment and then some.

Development continued, mainly to fix additional bugs and other quirks and to overall smooth things out. This would be the 4th release of gateWay known as V2.6. However, it was never released and only exists in source code which you can download here.

Here's a short description of gateWay:

gateWay GateWay offers a unique, streamlined approach to file management under GEOS. With a resizable Note Pad, proportional slider and fuel gauge, the gateWay makes it easier to get where you're going. Convenient Status Boxes will indicate current copy or delete status and brand new disk and file Info Boxes let you quickly get the information you want. An integrated Control Panel replaces Preferences, and lets you choose your colors, background pattern, input and printer drivers, set the clock, and define function keys. The gateWay also provides a file locating browse feature, and a new Trash Can mechanism that never throws away files until you tell it to. Powerful Device Support Three drive support with auto swapping (for applications which recognize only two drives) allows you to launch your applications and copy to and from drive C directly. GateWay also eliminates the need for CONFIGURE by using 'disk driver' files which collectively require less space on your boot disk. For CMD HD Series hard drives, FD Series floppy drives, and RAMLink, gateWay provides access to multiple 1581 or CMD Native partitions, or even CMD Native partition subdirectories. The gateWay also provides access to up to 2 Megabytes of RAM in a Commodore REU or a GEORAM. And to help you identify your disks quickly, gateWay allows you to individually define disk icons using any existing file icon. Do you use RAM expansion? Then you can access multiple tasks with the gateWay's Switcher, which allows two separate tasks to run concurrently. Imagine having geoWrite and geoPaint running at the same time. Imagine the ease with which you could paste graphics and text scraps between them. Plus the ability to quit from either application and launch another at any time. Only with the gateWay - a whole new integrated way of working with GEOS. D64 images of the original V2.5 gateWay 64 and gateWay 128 are available for downloading on the GEOS "Other useful things" page.

The purpose of releasing the source code for gateWay is not to aid in getting it improved and re-released, but rather to give programmers something to look at and study and perhaps use in their own programming projects. Even though gateWay had a few problems, it also contained a great deal of innovative programming that others may be able to learn from.

Jim Collette did all the programming on his Amiga using a 6502 cross-assembler known as DASM. The version of DASM he used was customized to do the type of work he needed to do. You can also download DASM here if you would like to set up the gateWay source code on an Amiga. For assembling directly on a Commodore 64 or 128, you can take all the gateWay source code files and convert them into geoWrite format. Then, with some minor changes here and there, you should be able to use GeoProgrammer in GEOS or Concept in Wheels to assemble and link the files.

Of course, if all you want to do is look at the source code for ideas in your own programming projects, they are just plain ascii text files that can be loaded into most any text editor. Since they are text files formatted for the Amiga, they use just a line-feed (LF) character at the end of each line. This will work fine on a Linux machine, but will need to be converted to CR/LF characters for use on an MS-DOS/Windows machine.

NOTE: There is no warranty or support whatsoever provided with these files. These are being provided as-is. The files supplied will completely assemble properly on an Amiga and may then be transferred over to a Commodore 64/128 GEOS setup for use in the GEOS environment. The resulting code might also work on an emulator with the GEOS system that can be downloaded elsewhere here, but there is no guarantee whatsoever. An experienced programmer can also rework the source code fairly easily to be able to completely assemble and link the files on a Commodore 64 or 128 from within the GEOS or Wheels environment using GeoProgrammer or Concept.

Original files as they were last used by Jim Collette

DASM.LHA - Complete DASM assembler with source code.
GWSOURCE.LHA - (453 KBytes) Complete source code for gateWay 2.6

Instructions for the Amiga: You'll need a hard drive on your Amiga because all the files included in the archives take up more than 1mb of disk space and won't fit on an 880K Amiga floppy disk.

Begin by creating a couple of new directories to hold all the files. On my Amiga, the directories are "DH1:Programming/GEOS/" and "DH1:Programming/DASM/". Unpack the DASM.LHA archive to the DASM directory and the GWSOURCE.LHA archive to the GEOS directory.

Next, you'll need to get the custom DASM assembler program copied into your C: directory. There is actually two versions of DASM in the archive. One is the standard version and the other is the custom one that you'll need for assembling gateWay. Look inside the DASM directory and you'll find a directory called c. Inside the c directory is a file called DASM. Copy this version of DASM to the C: directory on your Amiga. It will now be available for use from the command line of a CLI. At this point, that is all you really need from the DASM directory. If you're short on disk space, you can delete the entire DASM directory. Or you can study it if you'd like to see how a 6502 assembler is coded since all of the DASM source code is included.

Next, you'll need to add a line to your user-startup file if you have one in your S: directory. If not, then add a line to the startup-sequence file. Using a text editor, add the following line at or near the end of the file:

assign >NIL geoProg: DH1:Programming/GEOS/gateWay/

This will assign the name geoProg: to the directory where the source code files are located. Be sure to substitute the actual directory you created. The gateWay directory listed at the end of the string above will be created when the .LHA archive is unpacked. So, if on your system, you created a directory called PRG/GEOS in the DH0: partition on your hard drive, your user-startup line would look like the following:

assign >NIL geoProg: DH0:PRG/GEOS/gateWay/

The line in your user-startup file is needed because some of the source code files contain lines of code that make reference to other files and they need to know how to find the files. The files will all be located in the geoProg: directory and other subdirectories contained within. If you move the entire directory to another place, you don't have to edit all the source files, you simply change the one line in your user-startup file.

You're not ready to start assembling yet, because your Amiga still doesn't really know anything about the geoProg: directory. You'll have to reboot so that the user-startup file is re-read and the geoProg: directory name is assigned. Instead of rebooting, you can also enter the same command line in a CLI and it will be effective immediately. You can also do this instead of adding the line to your user-startup file if you don't want the geoProg: directory assigned every time you boot your Amiga.

Now, let's assemble gateWay. On Jim's Amiga, he had a couple of utilities that aren't included here that made things a little easier for him. This would have been a make and a DMake program. With these programs, he could edit his source code files and wouldn't have to remember which ones he altered. By running the make program, a special make file is read and then commands contained within would be executed. The make program would find the files that have been changed and would call DASM to assemble them. Only the changed files would be reassembled. You can do a search on the Internet and possibly find these make and DMake programs.

However, you can still assemble gateWay without them. But, you'll have to assemble each file one at a time and if you make any changes, you'll have to remember which one to reassemble. You'll actually be running DASM in a linker mode. For instance, when you want to assemble gateWay 64, you'll actually assemble the .lnk file that goes with it. DASM will assemble all the source code files that belong to the .lnk file and will provide you with the actual finished copy of gateWay 64 in a GEOS convert format. You can then transfer the file to a Commodore GEOS disk and use Convert 2.5 from within GEOS to convert it into a GEOS format file.

Each part of gateWay is contained in separate directories. You'll assemble the .lnk files in each directory. But before doing so, you'll have to examine the DMakeFile that is contained within the directory to find out what commands you'll need to issue to DASM for the file you're assembling. Let's do gateWay 64 and you'll see how it's done. From a CLI, go to the directory that contains the .lnk file for gateWay 64. It's actually the same directory for both the 64 and 128 versions. There are .if statements within the source files to differentiate between the two versions.

cd geoProg:gateWay

We are now in the correct directory for assembling the main gateWay programs. If you study the contents of the DMakefile in this directory, you'll see it has a line that starts with GW64 and another that starts with GW128. Just below these is the command line for DASM. You'll actually enter the same command from your CLI command line by hand. So, to assemble gateWay 64, enter the following command and hit RETURN:

dasm part.lnk -oGW64 -DREALSMALL

That will call up the DASM assembler and instruct it to perform all the instructions and commands contained within the PART.LNK file. It will create a new file called GW64 and will try to make the code as compact as possible. Remember, the file will be in Convert 2.5 format so it can be transferred to a real Commodore 64 and then converted from within GEOS to GEOS format. For gateWay 128, do the same with the following command line that you'll find within the DMakefile:

dasm part.lnk -oGW128 -DC128 -DREALSMALL

If all of the above instructions worked for you, then do the same for all the other .LNK files you find in the other subdirectories and you'll have created the entire gateWay V2.6 package.

gateWay source code files in a pkzip archive

GWSOURCE.ZIP - (466 KBytes) Complete source code for gateWay 2.6