>  Actually, I'm told on multiple fronts that the "X is bloated" thing is
>largely a myth - listing memory usage counts the memory apertures to the
>graphics card's frame buffer, artificially inflating space.

My X server uses a bit over 60mb of ram. My AGP aperature size is 16mb.
60-16 is still 44.

>  Or to look at it another way - People were running X back when 4 megs
>was a huge amount of memory. It must be *possible* to cram X down into a
>limited memory space, whether or not current implementations do so by
>default.

Accually most people did not run X on a system with 4mb of ram. The only
real use for it back then was on SGI workstations, and such. As for
cramming it in; it's possible, but not even pacman would run (decently)
after cramming X in. The swap space (at the moment, almost surely across a
network) would be working like mad.

>  As for GTK... GTK would be largely useless for the type of game I'd
>write, and gaming would be my only use for a graphics layer. GTK would be
>a great framework for applications - but a game would be displaying one
>big bitmap in a fullscreen window, and little else. Most of GTK's features
>are redundant in this context.

X is not even nice for writing games. The only possible justification for
cramming X into 16mb of ram with the intended purpose of coding/playing
games could be APIs like OpenGL, which is already available on the DC.

>  So for writing word processors for the Dreamcast, by all means; but
>either X or (preferably) a dumb framebuffer layer would be more suitable
>for, say, porting Quake.

So, uhh, write a dumb frame buffer layer. it wouldn't be too hard, you
just wouldn't be able to use the hardware for acceleration much.

>  This brings up another point that I mentioned previously - Why isn't
>the NetBSD/Dreamcast project clean-rooming advances made by other
>Dreamcast projects? This would greatly reduce the amount of effort needed
>for development of features that have already been researched.

Why isn't the NetBSD/Dreamcast project making advances at all? Because no
one is really doing a whole lot (sorry to those of you who are devoting
time to the project, and I missed your submissions to the list).