As mentioned in the previous post, Word War vi is a retro arcade game along the lines of Defender or Stargate, allowing you to play out the Emacs vs Vim wars in all their nostalgic glory. It’ll run on Mac OS X, but it takes a bit of preparation. Here’s what I did to get it running on Leopard (10.5.5); your mileage may vary on older OS versions. Also, I don’t have a joystick to test, so I am unsure if that will work or not.

1. Download and unarchive wordwarvi
2. First up, make sure you have XTools installed, which you’ll find on your Leopard install DVD. You’ll also need the X11.app found in your Applications/Utilities folder, but that is likely already there.
3. Next, install MacPorts. This will make it very simple to install the next two packages.
4. Once MacPorts is installed, go to the Terminal and type sudo port install libvorbis (you’ll need to enter your password).
5. Repeat the process with sudo port install portaudio
6. Lastly, we need to specify where a particular file is found on your system. Inside the wordwarvi folder, there are two text files to edit: ogg_to_pcm.c and wordwarvi.c

In both files, near the top, you’ll find a line that reads:

#include <malloc.h>

Change it to read:

#include <malloc/malloc.h>

And that’s all the preparatory steps. In the wordwarvi folder via the Terminal, type make. It will compile shortly, and then (assuming everything went well), you’ll only have to enter ./wordwarvi to play it via X11.app.

You might want to turn the volume down on your Mac to start with — the music was pretty loud on my system.

Thanks to Stephen Cameron for the great game!