Version 1 of Bundle o' Starkits

Updated 2005-01-20 17:54:38 by jcw

Brian Theado 20Jan2005 - Inspired by the wealth of Tcl/Tk games available at sdarchive and elsewhere, I wrote some code that can be used to browse and execute a bunch of applications all bundled together into a single starkit.

I bundled together over 60 games in a just over 2MB starkit that can be downloaded from http://tkoutline.sourceforge.net/tkgamepack.kit . Run the program and see a hierarchical list of Tcl/Tk games. Click on the game title to launch it. Click on the game's url to find more information. Add the title of a game to the command line and that game will be run directly.

http://tkoutline.sourceforge.net/tkgamepack.png

Implementation details.

  • Each game is itself an unmodified starkit. Each starkit's vfs is extracted into the main directory of the Game pack starkit
  • Each game is launched in its own slave interpreter.
  • Most of the starkits were pulled unmodified from sdarchive. I found a couple of dozen more games on the wiki and at tclapps that I starkitified and added in. Some of these needed a "package require Tk" added.
  • I did have to modify one game dots and boxes because it was trying to do some things with the console that didn't work in a slave interpreter.
  • The interface for selecting games is an outline from tkoutline. The full functionality of tkoutline is also available (see the miscelleneous category) just because it is there.
  • I find the interface to be a bit cluttered, but using an outline was the easiest way for me to get this working (and I am motivated to make use of my own code).
  • Adding new games involves adding new text to the launcher outline (using the full version of tkoutline) and adding a new starkit vfs.

Way cool! I've wondered for a long time when someone would take the initiative on this ;) -jcw