August 28, 06 Want to see a version of Romulan Hunt that's closest to the original? Or do you want to learn how to write a Foundation Tool (a command line program using ObjC)? Or just curious? This is the command line version of Romulan Hunt that began as a self-lesson in ObjC. It includes the source code, the executable (PPC only, but you can recompile the source for Intel), and a man page.



Requirements: Terminal (or xterm in X11). Updated for OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Universal binary, should run on Intel.

Version Changes:

• Added -v flag. Romhunt now reports the version information if you use this flag.
  
• Re-compiled as Universal binary. Should run on Intel Macs.

Historically, this program is both the oldest and newest version of Romulan Hunt currently in existence. Oldest because it bears the most resemblance to the original program as it was written in Applesoft Basic (or the VAX Basic version that came a couple years later). I always liked this version for one reason: I could play it with the keypad only! No mouse or keyboard necessary, just the number pad and one hand.

It is the newest version because I just re-re-rewrote it. As anyone who has downloaded the AppleScript Studio version of this program knows (if they read the README file), this program is over 20 years old and has been written for every machine and language I've had or learned on. Mostly, I use it as a learning tool for picking up new languages, since I know the program so well and how it should behave, it lets me focus on the new language I'm learning and forget the details of the actual application.

In this case, I'm teaching myself Objective-C (ObjC) and intend to then teach myself Cocoa programming. As a step toward that end, I purposely wrote an ObjC class, "warbird," that I hope will be able to be ported to the Cocoa version of the program.

I hope the source code is helpful. I found it very difficult to find ObjC programming examples that weren't Cocoa apps, and that's mostly why I'm posting this is to help others that may come behind me. If you want to write your own command line app that uses ObjC rather than just C, select "Foundation Tool" as the type of project to start in XCode. You'll find, as I did, that it also creates a template for the man page, and since it did that for me, I figured I might as well finish it and make a real unix program!

Download command line version of Romulan Hunt and source free.