KGoldrunner

KGoldrunner - History and Versions

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History and Acknowledgements

KGoldrunner is based on an early computer game called Lode Runner (TM) which was written in the USA by Doug Smith and first released in 1983. It appeared originally on the Apple II and Commodore 64 computers, which was where the Wadham family and Marco Krüger fell in love with it. You can find out more about Lode Runner and the various versions that have come out since 1983, on the website Jason's Lode Runner Archive (http://entropymine,com/jason/lr/). That site also has the story of Lode Runner's original development in the file "misc/ldhist.html".

KGoldrunner is an attempt to preserve the spirit of the original classic game on a platform that will be portable and will last more than a few years. It is available as free software in source code form. Copies of the original game are unobtainable now and the machines it ran on are going into museums.

Marco Krüger developed KGoldrunner as far as v0.3, out of nostalgia for the original Commodore 64 game. Ian Wadham added several features and levels to make it v1.0. Ian's son Peter composed the 100 levels in the "Peter W Initiation" game and the 20 tricky levels in "Vengeance of Peter W". The other levels were composed by Ian, Peter, Marco Krüger and friends and Ian's other children, Simon and Genevieve.

Platforms, Versions and Portability

The first versions of KGoldrunner are based on the Linux operating system and IBM PC compatible machines, using the KDE 1 or KDE 2 desktop.

KGoldrunner is written in C++, using Linux and the free-software version of the portable Qt object and GUI library. It was developed under SuSE Linux 6.3 and 7.2. KGoldrunner v1.0 compiles and runs either with KDE 1 and Qt 1 or with KDE 2 and Qt 2.

The Qt 2 version of KGoldrunner is intended to be almost independent of the operating system and desktop. This means it should be fairly easy to port KGoldrunner to other operating systems, such as Windows and Macintosh, because the Qt 2 library and C++ language are portable to other operating systems and the KGoldrunner source code is available.

If you are interested in porting KGoldrunner, see the sections on Installation and Technical Details at the end of this documentation, but please contact one of the KGoldrunner authors before you start, just to make sure you are up-to-date with any recent work.


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