Spellcast is a strange little strategy game, which I found on the Net and have implemented for X. Basically, two or more players try to vaporize each other with a wide assortment of wizardly spells. For the complete rules, see the man page (spellcast.6), which goes into exhaustive detail. Compiling should be straightforward; spellcast uses only Xlib, with no widget sets or other libraries. NOTE: Some (all?) versions of SunOS have a buggy realloc(), which causes spellcast to crash early and often. If you're on a Sparc and you have this problem, the fix is to compile with -lbsdmalloc. Uncomment the OTHERLIBS line in the Makefile. The Makefile begins with a few definitions which you can change: the directories where everything gets installed; the default fonts that the program tries to load (usually times 14, helvetica 12, and fixed, in that order); the directory in which game transcripts are stored (usually /tmp.) Type "make" or "make spellcast" to create the executable. "make stupid" will create a version of the game with a terribly stupid, text-only interface -- this is not very playable, and is really only good for testing. You enter all the players' moves in a single string at the prompt, and answer questions as they appear. The file spelllist.ps is a PostScript document showing all the available spells, in two columns: one sorted by gesture, and one sorted by name. By default, it will be installed as DESTDIR/lib/spellcast/spelllist.ps. The original paper-and-pencil version of this game was created by Richard Bartle. This implementation is by Andrew Plotkin (ap1i+@andrew.cmu.edu). It is copyright 1993 by Andrew Plotkin. The source code may be freely copied, distributed, and modified, as long as this copyright notice is retained.
