In order to successfully compile this you will need a C compiler that supports C99+ and ncurses; note that for some platforms (e.g. Red Hat based Linux) you will need two different packages: the library itself but also the dev package that has the header files etc. If you use the Makefile obviously you need make too.

In gameplay.md I show how to easily customise the colours, set up different gameplay modes and various other things. The troubleshooting.md and terminals.md as well as bugs.md include a variety of information should you run into trouble.

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Portability

I have tested this under macOS Catalina, macOS Ventura (and probably between the two), Fedora (29 and also 31 - no that’s not a typo, I upgraded from 29 to 31 as I had delayed upgrading to 30 due to a number of issues and being busy) and CentOS 7.7.1908. It should work under any modern linux system and maybe other Unices as well as macOS (as noted).

It obviously requires ncurses but other than that nothing extra should be needed. Note that the testing of Fedora 29 was earlier in the development however (but then 29 is also EOL).

Furthermore I do not believe - but I cannot confirm either - that endianness matters; I only have Intel CPUs and arm64 (MacBook Pro M1).

I imagine that it works for 32-bit systems but I do not know for sure.

Portability: macOS

You should be able to get the compiler with:

sudo xcode-select --install

You don’t need Xcode itself and it appears that the command line tools (as above should install) already has ncurses so there shouldn’t be anything else that needs to be done. But I’m not actually sure of this - I’m seeing conflicting information and it’s been too long; anyway there’s always MacPorts and also Homebrew which should be sufficient; I do NOT recommend Homebrew however: it takes ownership of /usr/local: as in the user you run it as is the new owner so that you don’t need sudo because … Well never mind.

Portability: Fedora

You’ll need the packages gcc, ncurses and ncurses-devel (plus make if you want to use the Makefile) to compile and link this entry. With Fedora more recent versions there’s the dnf package manager but I cannot help with any of the GUI installers since I don’t use them. Something like:

sudo dnf install ncurses-devel ncurses make gcc

or

# dnf install ncurses-devel ncurses make gcc

Portability: CentOS

Just like Fedora you will need gcc, ncurses, ncurses-devel (and if you want to use the Makefile make). CentOS uses yum and CentOS 8 uses dnf. So:

sudo yum install ncurses-devel ncurses make gcc

or

# yum install ncurses-devel ncurses make gcc

or

sudo dnf install ncurses-devel ncurses make gcc

or

# dnf install ncurses-devel ncurses make gcc

You can also use clang to compile (which is what gcc actually is under macOS).

Compilation notes

As long as you have the dependencies above the only thing that comes to mind is integer width problems.

If size_t does not equate to unsigned long: In this case if say it’s an unsigned long long then theoretically you should be able to change the strtoul() to be strtoull() (after updating the typedef for unsigned long to be unsigned long long maybe?). It appears to work from a quick test at least.

If it’s an unsigned int I believe you will have to opt for an unsigned long (so strtoul() cast to an unsigned int).

Anything else I do not know other than just changing the typedef and updating to the proper function (and/or cast to the right type).