cmines is an implementation of the game of minesweeper for the Linux
console. The object of the game is to expose all the cells in a
rectangular grid which are not mined. When an unmined cell is exposed,
the number of neighboring cells which are mined is shown. By applying
this information, you attempt to proceed through the minefield.

INSTALLING

To support the mouse, you will need to have the gpm library installed,
as well as the include file gpm.h. Alternately, you can build the
program without mouse support by including the --disable-mouse option
when running ./configure at the top-level directory.

An alternate version of cmines is included, which uses ncurses and
therefore does not require the Linux console. The mouse handling is
noticeably different (and is unavailable on the console unless you've
built ncurses with gpm support), but otherwise it looks very much like
the normal version. To build this version, include the --with-ncurses
option when running ./configure at the top-level directory.

By default, the executable is copied to /usr/local/games.

NOTE ON CHARACTER SETS

The terminfo entry for the Linux console typically handles the
"alternate" character set (i.e., the VT100 line-drawing characters) by
switching to the user-defined font map and using the nearest
equivalents from the native IBM PC set. (In fact, Linux has a separate
font map specifically for the VT100 line-drawing characters, but most
Linux installations' terminfo entries fail to take advantage of it.)

In particular, the VT100 bullet character is actually mapped to a
centered block, and not a centered dot as it appears on an actual
VT100. So, if cmines starts up with a field of blocks, and you think
(as I do) that it looks kind of ugly, try including the --with-latin1
option when running ./configure at the top-level directory, and
rebuilding. This will tell cmines to use the Latin-1 middle-dot
character instead of the VT100 bullet.

Brian Raiter <breadbox@muppetlabs.com>
September, 2000