
intro -- introduction to the okbridge program
Matthew Clegg.  August 1990.


General Description
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The okbridge program is an interactive computer-mediated bridge game.
It allows four players at (not necessarily) different locations on the
internet to participate in a game of rubber or Chicago (duplicate)
bridge.  The program handles the dealing, scoring and communication of
bids and plays.  It is screen oriented, although the screen display is
rather simplistic.


Copyright Notice
--------- ------

Copyright (C) 1990-1992 by Matthew Clegg.  All Rights Reserved

OKbridge is made available as a free service to the Internet.
Accordingly, the following restrictions are placed on its use:

1.  OKbridge may not be modified in any way without the explicit 
    permission of Matthew Clegg.  

2.  OKbridge may not be used in any way for commercial advantage.
    It may not be placed on for-profit networks or on for-profit
    computer systems.  It may not be bundled as part of a package
    or service provided by a for-profit organization.

If you have questions about restrictions on the use of OKbridge,
write to mclegg@cs.ucsd.edu.

DISCLAIMER:  The user of OKbridge accepts full responsibility for any
damage which may be caused by OKbridge.




System Requirements
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The program has been compiled and tested on a few SUN and VAX systems
running derivatives of BSD UNIX.  The okbridge program uses the
"curses" library, which is available at most sites.  It also requires
that the machine on which it is running be an internet site.  If you
obtained this software through the use of the 'ftp' program, then your
machine is probably an internet site.  The source code is written in
the C programming language.


History
-------

My interest in bridge began as an undergraduate at the University of
California, Riverside, where I learned the game.  After some time, I
ended up in Berkeley :-), while one of my best bridge-playing friends
somehow wound up stuck in Oklahoma :-(.  But then a bridge program was
discovered archived somewhere on the net, and we happily continued
playing.  When I later moved to Finland (my wife is Finnish :-), it
became impossible to use this program anymore.  So, I set out to write
a new bridge program which would correct the deficiencies of the old one.

The old bridge program was quite inspirational, but it was also rather
idiosyncratic.  Perhaps the difficulties with it can best be described
by the authors themselves:

        This program provides communication between different
        machines so that people can play bridge even they are
        on different machine.  It is written by Shyan-Ming
        Yuan and Jiang-Hsing Chu at University of Maryland,
        College Park.  It was tested on Vaxes and Sun 3/50
        running BSD 4.2 and BSD 4.3.  Since we don't have the
        previlege to create a 'bridge daemon' as a normal
        user, we decided to use 'talk daemon' instead.  The
        underlying communication program is modified from the
        'talk' program.  You will have confusion in trying to
        connect to the others...

In particular, we found that the talk daemons on various systems were
often incompatible.  So it was only possible for us to play when all
four of us logged onto a single machine via telnet.  In writing the
new program, I have abandoned the use of the 'talk daemon' in favor of
establishing the network connections directly through operating system
calls.  This has the advantage that it is universally standardized and
perhaps faster and more reliable.  Also, the user interface for the
old program was very unforgiving.  I have tried to correct this
deficiency too.



Further Documentation
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README.Install 
  Instructions about how to compile and install the program on your system.

README.Playing
  Instructions about how to operate the program.
