Ubuntu Manpage: xpat2 - generic patience game for X11

NAME

       xpat2 - generic patience game for X11

SYNOPSIS

       xpat2 [ options ] [ seed ] [ saved game ]

DESCRIPTION

       xpat2  is  the successor of xpat, a generic patience game which can be used with different
       rule sets.  It does understand the rules  of  the  well-known  Spider  game,  as  well  as
       Klondike  and  others.   It  features  a  flexible  layout which responds to window resize
       commands and possibilities to customize the existing rules.  xpat2 has  either  a  bitmap-
       based  card  drawing routine or a pixmap based routine (selectable at compile time).  With
       the pixmap based drawing routine, antialiased colour images of the rank and  suit  symbols
       are  supplied.   The bitmap card images are black and red by default, but users can supply
       images of complete colour cards in XPM format.

       xpat2 may be compiled with the Athena widget set (or  its  nicer  replacement,  the  Xaw3d
       widget set), or with a standard Xlib interface. The command line parameters and X resource
       names of these versions differ. This manual page describes only the Athena widget version,
       for the Xlib options please refer to the xpat manual page.

RULE CUSTOMIZATION OPTIONS

-rules rule name
(Resource: Tableau.rules)

This option specifies the initial rule set for xpat. Valid rule names are Gypsy,
Spider, FreeCell, Klondike, and Seahaven, Monte Carlo, Calculation, Canfield, Baker's
Dozen, and others. Supply an invalid rule name to see a complete listing.

The initial rule set may also be given by the name of the executable (capitalisation
is important). A predefined rule set may be customized by the following options, but
not all options apply to every rule set.

-slots slots
(Resource: Tableau.slots)

Use a different number of slots.

-tmps tmps
(Resource: Tableau.tmps)

Use a different number of temporary storage places.

-decks decks
(Resource: Tableau.decks)

Use a different number of decks. Every deck has a full set of 52 cards. This option
does also set the number of stacks. (To 4 times the number of decks, naturally.)

-facedown number
(Resource: Tableau.facedown)

Specifies the number of cards per slot which are initially dealt face-down (i.e.
invisible).

-faceup number
(Resource: Tableau.faceup)

Specifies the number of cards per slot which are initially dealt face-up.

-jokers number
(Resource: Tableau.jokers)

Specifies the number of jokers in the game (increasing the number of cards). With
jokers, you have to put all ordinary cards onto the stacks and keep the jokers on the
slots.

-relaxed number
-flips number -turn number -rotations number (Resource: Tableau.relaxed to
Tableau.rotations)

Defines game specific customisation parameters.

-rng number
(Resource: Tableau.rng)

This option affects the random number generator. rng 0 (used up to version 1.03 of
xpat2) has been found to generate not uniformly distributed permutations. You may
activate it to be able to replay old saved games. The default is rng 1.

GRAPHIC OPTIONS

All standard X toolkit parameters may be given, such as

-display display
Specifies on which display to run.

-geometry geometry
(Resource: geometry) Specifies the initial geometry.

Other options are:

-cards cardset
(Resource: Tableau.cards)

cardset is the filename of an external bitmap card set which will be used instead of
the built-in cardset. There are two card sets, namely small and french. You can also
give the full pathname of a cardset here.

-xpmdir xpmdir
(Resource: Tableau.xpmdir)

Tells xpat2 to search xpmdir for colour replacements of the card images. The filenames
searched for are Joker.xpm and Rank.Suit.xpm, where Rank is one of Two to Ten, or one
of Jack, Queen, King, Ace. The display must be capable of displaying all images at
the same time. For a 256-colour display, no more than 128 colours should be used for
all card images together. An additional file, Cardback.xpm, may give you nice
cardbacks.

If the directory name xpmdir does not start with a dot or a slash, it is interpreted
as a subdirectory of /usr/share/games/xpat.

-xpmcls xpmcls
(Resource: Tableau.xpmcls)

Tells xpat2 to allow using colours of the given closeness when allocation of the real
colour fails during the reading of an xpm file. This option is useful on 8-bit X-
servers when many colours are already allocated by other applications (typically when
using a KDE desktop).

-tb color
(Resource: Tableau.background)

Sets the background color to color. The default is LightSlateGrey.

-cb color
(Resource: Tableau.cardbackColor)

Sets the background color of the cards to color. The default is SlateGrey. This option
is not in effect when an XPM replacement for the cardback is used.

-markwidth width
(Resource: Tableau.markWidth)

Sets the width of the dashed frame which marks selected cards. If this width is at
least half of the card width, marked cards will be shaded. The default is to shade the
cards.

-markcolor color
(Resource: markColor)

Sets the color of the marking frame.

-sound, -nosound
(Resource: Sound.state)

Enables or Disables sound.

NATIVE LANGUAGE SUPPORT

       xpat2 has simple support for different languages. All messages which  appear  in  the  X11
       window  may  be  overloaded  by  files,  as well as the key bindings.  The typical support
       consists of an application-defaults file, a message file, and a  keyboard  file.  Possibly
       translated  online-help  files are also there.  To select a different language, call xpat2
       after setting the environment variable LANG to the desired value.  Some  ISO3166  language
       codes  will be mapped to their correspondig xpat2 directory names.  Currently, italian and
       german versions are available, and fragments of a french and russian version.  The russian
       version  requires  a special cyrillic font, sq01.  The bdf-file is distributed with xpat2,
       you have to convert it into a format supported by your X-server (pcf, snf, ...)

FILES

        /usr/games/xpat2
        /var/games/xpat2/xpat.log
        /usr/share/doc/xpat2
        /usr/share/games/xpat/small.cards
        /usr/share/games/xpat/french.cards
        /usr/share/games/xpat/audio/success.au
        /usr/share/games/xpat/audio/giveup.au
        /usr/share/games/xpat/audio/goodbye.au
        /usr/share/games/xpat/audio/cannotsave.au
        /usr/share/games/xpat/help.*
        /usr/share/games/xpat/hlp*

       and a number of subdirs of /usr/share/games/xpat, containing sets of colour cards.

DIAGNOSTICS

       Almost none. (Type 'v' to see the version number. This is the man-page  of  xpat2  version
       1.06,  using Athena Widgets. The game may behave somewhat different when used with another
       widget set.)

BUGS

       If the window is too small, it can happen that not all information is displayed, e.g. some
       stacks of card are invisible as they are outside the visible space.

       Correct cheat counting is not implemented in all rules.

       Only a few rule customisations are checked and meaningful.

       The Motif/Lesstif and Xview interfaces doesn't work reliable. Any volunteers?

       xpat2 uses a lot of colours when compiled with the module X-gfx2 and may therefore fail to
       start if you have an 8-bit or monochrome display. In this case, compile the game using the
       graphics  loader X-gfx1, which uses the original card images from spider or start the game
       using the option -cards  french,  which  uses  monochrome  card  graphics  from  the  file
       french.cards.  On 8-bit displays you can also experiment with the -xpmcls option.

       There  is  a problem with X-servers which are short on memory. In this case, some parts of
       the xpat2 window may be left blank after a resize event.  You have to hit <ctrl-L> to  get
       the window redrawn correctly.

       Please mail bug reports to Michael.Bischoff@gmx.net.  Fixes are especially welcome.

AUTHORS

       Heiko Eissfeldt and Michael Bischoff

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (c) 1994 by Heiko Eissfeldt and Michael Bischoff
       (heiko@colossus.escape.de and mbi@mo.math.nat.tu-bs.de)

       Copyright (c) 1990 by David Lemke & Network Computing Devices, Inc.
       (lemke@ncd.com)

       Copyright 1990 Heather Rose and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

       Copyright (c) 1989, Donald R. Woods and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

       Permission  to  use,  copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for
       any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the  above  copyright  notice
       appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear
       in supporting documentation.

       xpat and xpat2 were developed under Linux, the free UNIX for the IBM-PC  and  compatibles.
       xpat  is based on the game spider.  All new code which is not covered by spider copyrights
       is distributed by terms of the GNU General public license (GNU Copyleft).