Spider, Games, Solitaire

Installation

  To rebuild spider from the sources just execute @make.com. This will check for the
  availability of MMS/MMK and use either one of these or perform a pure DCL build. The
  build process depends on a correct installation of the Xaw library, as well as
  definitions(see below) for the associated shareable images and include files. In case you haven't
  upgraded to OpenVMS 7.x yet also the Xvmsutils are needed. The installation procedure
  will check for the libraries if necessary and issue appropriate messages before
  attempting to build spider. During the build no further input is required. 


Setup

  During runtime you should have a logical named SPIDER_DIR defined, which points to the
  directory where you keep the documentation for Spider (doc.* files of the
  distribution). These are needed by the help system of Spider. 


Hints

  The random algorithm to select the cards is seeded with the process id, i.e. if you
  invoke Spider twice from the same session you'll get the same sequence of games. To
  avoid this you might want to spawn a new process to run Spider in. The command I
  usually use for this is spawn/nowait/notify/input=nl:/output=sys$scratch:do.log (and
  since I'm lazy I do have a symbol named DO to avoid typing this long command over and
  over again). 

Installation of Xaw3d/Xmu

Shareable Images


  The result of the built are two shareable images, one for Xaw3d and one for
  Xmu. Although one can give a full path for a shareable image at link time,
  OpenVMS does expect to find the file in sys$share at runtime. OTOH for various
  reasons one might not want/be able to place the files in this location. To
  solve this problem just define a logical with the same name as the shareable
  image and point with this to the location of the image in the filesystem, e.g.
  on my system I have: 

$ sh log xmulibshr
   "XMULIBSHR" = "PUBBIN:XMULIBSHR" (LNM$PROCESS_TABLE)
$ sh log xaw3dlibshr
   "XAW3DLIBSHR" = "PUBBIN:XAW3DLIBSHR" (LNM$PROCESS_TABLE)


Header files

  Source files ported from a Unix system often contain include statements like
  this #include <X11/Xmu/file.h>, which reflects the organization of these files
  on this OS, i.e. the header files for Xmu/Xaw(3d)/... are located in a
  sub-directory of the one containing the X11 header files. To be able to work
  with syntax like this on an OpenVMS system one has to tweak the usual
  definition of the logical X11 a bit ;-). 
  One thing is that one has to make X11 a rooted logical, so that a path like
  x11:[xmu] (which is what the above translates to on OpenVMS) makes sense. The
  second is that once again one might want to separate the header files delivered
  by Digital from the ones coming with this package. To do this create a toplevel
  directory as the home for non-DEC header files and add to this subdirectories
  named xmu and xaw. Copy the header-files from the distribution to these new
  directories. 
  As an example the definition on my system looks like this: 

$ sh log x11
   "X11" = "X11ADD" (LNM$PROCESS_TABLE)
        = "X11ADD:[XPM.LIB]"
        = "DECW$INCLUDE"
        = "PUBBIN"
1  "X11ADD" = "DKA300:[PUBLIC.XTOOLS.LIBS.]" (LNM$PROCESS_TABLE)
1  "DECW$INCLUDE" = "SYS$SYSROOT:[DECW$INCLUDE]" (DECW$LOGICAL_NAMES)
        = "SYS$SYSROOT:[DECW$INCLUDE.EXTENSIONS]"
1  "PUBBIN" = "PUBLIC$ROOT:[AEXE]" (LNM$PROCESS_TABLE)
   "X11" = "DECW$INCLUDE" (DECW$LOGICAL_NAMES)
1  "DECW$INCLUDE" = "SYS$SYSROOT:[DECW$INCLUDE]" (DECW$LOGICAL_NAMES)
        = "SYS$SYSROOT:[DECW$INCLUDE.EXTENSIONS]"

  x11add
    Rooted logicals have to be first in the list (in this case x11add), also note
    that a rooted logical may not contain another rooted logical in its
    definition. 
  x11add:[xpm.lib]
    Location of the X Pixmap Library header files. On Unix they are stored
    directly in the X11 directory. 
  decw$include 
    Also get the standard header files ;-) 
  pubbin 
    Actually not the location of header files, but rather the place where I keep my
    libraries. In some circumstances usefull for linking purposes. 


The latest version of the OpenVMS port of Spider should always be 
accessible via 

http://zinser.no-ip.info/vms/sw/spider.htmlx