''XBill'' is an arcade style game for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

. The game features a bespectacled character known as "Bill" (a spoof of

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

). The goal is to prevent Bill's legions of clones from installing "Wingdows", a

virus A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Since Dmitri Ivanovsk ...

"cleverly designed to resemble a popular

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

" (a parody of

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

), on a variety of computers running other operating systems. It was very popular among Linux gamers at the end of the 1990s, beating out '' Quake'', though not ''

Quake II ''Quake II'' is a 1997 first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. It is the second installment of the ''Quake'' series, but not a direct sequel to '' Quake''. The game's storyline is continued in its ...

'', as '' Linux Journal'' reader's favourite Linux game in 1999.

Gameplay

The operating systems are represented by logos shown on the computer screens. The computers the player must defend include PCs running

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

and BSD,

SPARCstation The SPARCstation, SPARCserver and SPARCcenter product lines are a series of SPARC-based computer workstations and servers in desktop, desk side (pedestal) and rack-based form factor configurations, that were developed and sold by Sun Microsyst ...

s with Solaris, SGI IRIX workstations,

Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

PalmPilot The PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional are the second generation of Palm PDA devices produced by Palm Inc (then a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics, later 3Com). These devices were launched on March 10, 1997. Accessories and pricing Pa ...

s, and

NeXTcube The NeXTcube is a high-end workstation computer developed, manufactured, and sold by NeXT from 1990 until 1993. It superseded the original NeXT Computer workstation and is housed in a similar cube-shaped magnesium enclosure, designed by frog desig ...

s. When Bill installs Wingdows onto a computer, its current operating system is placed beside it. Using the mouse, the player must squash Bill and drag discarded operating systems back to their computers. At the end of the level, points are accrued for every computer that is still running its original operating system. On later levels, computers are connected to each other with LAN cables, causing Wingdows to spread faster. Some computers may also catch fire. This can be cured by dragging buckets of

water Water (chemical formula ) is an Inorganic compound, inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and Color of water, nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living ...

onto them.

History

The game was written by Brian Wellington and

Matias Duarte Matias is a form of the given name Matthew. In German-speaking Europe it is most often written as Matthias. It appears in this form in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Alternate spellings are: Mathias, Mattias, Mattis, Mats and Matti. Matia ...

in summer 1994.history
on xbill.org Originally written in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

, the code base was later with version 2.1

refactored In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the '' factoring''—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structur ...

to C. The game was later in the end 1990s, deliberately

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

to Microsoft Windows. Ports to many other platforms as

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

Openmoko Openmoko is a discontinued project to create a family of Open-source model, open source mobile phones, including the hardware specification, the operating system (Openmoko Linux), and actual smartphone development implementation like the Neo 19 ...

, Android, and

Maemo Maemo is a software platform originally developed by Nokia, now developed by the community, for smartphones and Internet tablets. The platform comprises both the Maemo operating system and SDK. Maemo played a key role in Nokia's strategy to c ...

phones followed due to its open source nature. Re-implementations of the game also exist. In 2009, the project was resurrected as XBill-NG, similar in concept to Lincity-NG.

Reception and impact

''XBill'' was very popular among Linux gamers at the end of the 1990s, beating out '' Quake'', though not ''

'', as '' Linux Journal'' readers' favourite Linux game in 1999.1999 Reader's Choice Awards
- Linux Journal The game holds four out of five stars on

the Linux Game Tome Linux gaming refers to playing video games on a Linux operating system. History Linux gaming started largely as an extension of the already present Unix gaming scene, with both systems sharing many similar titles. These games were either m ...

and was noted by DesktopLinux.com. Despite its status, it is not always packaged with Linux distributions due to its "disparaging" content: for instance Fedora does not integrate itXBill Legal Opinion Required
-

Fedora Project The Fedora Project is an independent project to co-ordinate the development of Fedora Linux, a Linux-based operating system, operating with the vision of "''a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive, w ...

(February 2009) while Debian does. Somewhat illustrating its notoriety, graphics from the game are used on the website of the 2009

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft (" ...

campaign Windows 7 Sins.Windows 7 Sins website
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References

External links

* {{Official, http://www.xbill.org/
XBill
-

Freecode Freecode, formerly Freshmeat, is a website owned by BIZX, Inc., hosting mainly open-source software for programmers and developers. Among other things, the site also hosted user reviews and discussions. While a majority of the software covered is ...

1994 video games Open-source video games Unix games Linux games Classic Mac OS games Cultural depictions of Bill Gates Maemo games MacOS games Parody video games Video games developed in the United States Windows games Software wars Android (operating system) games IOS games Video games based on real people

Gameplay

History

Reception and impact

See also

References

External links