PurpleJillybeans on Nostr: Tonight's experiment: TriTeal CDE ships with a shared build of the Motif 1.2 library, ...
Tonight's experiment: TriTeal CDE ships with a shared build of the Motif 1.2 library, but doesn't include headers. Presumably you were meant to be able to run CDE/Motif apps you'd gotten elsewhere, but not to build your own.
Thankfully, someone uploaded a source package for Motif 1.2.5 to archive.org. I wasn't able to get it to build in the few minutes I tinkered with it, and it's not clear if the entire source tree is actually there or not, but at least all the headers were included. I made a /usr/dt/include directory and put the headers in the appropriate places, then I tried building something: xsol, a Motif-based Klondike solitaire game.
The result: not perfect, but that it works at all is pretty amazing to me. The code built with no warnings and the basic game works, though it's a bit glitchy. Trying to open the options or about dialogs makes it segfault, and occasionally a card will just cease to exist mid-drag, but it's still playable and winnable. Either the headers are slightly mismatched (they're from 1.2.5, while the libs are an unknown 1.2.x revision) or the game just wasn't meant to be built against such an old version of Motif.
Considering that Lesstif was available contemporarily and Motif itself has since been open-sourced, this was really just a stunt. But it was fun!
#RetroComputing #RetroDev
Published at
2025-06-20 05:10:03 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Tonight's experiment: TriTeal CDE ships with a shared build of the Motif 1.2 library, but doesn't include headers. Presumably you were meant to be able to run CDE/Motif apps you'd gotten elsewhere, but not to build your own.\n\nThankfully, someone uploaded a source package for Motif 1.2.5 to archive.org. I wasn't able to get it to build in the few minutes I tinkered with it, and it's not clear if the entire source tree is actually there or not, but at least all the headers were included. I made a /usr/dt/include directory and put the headers in the appropriate places, then I tried building something: xsol, a Motif-based Klondike solitaire game.\n\nThe result: not perfect, but that it works at all is pretty amazing to me. The code built with no warnings and the basic game works, though it's a bit glitchy. Trying to open the options or about dialogs makes it segfault, and occasionally a card will just cease to exist mid-drag, but it's still playable and winnable. Either the headers are slightly mismatched (they're from 1.2.5, while the libs are an unknown 1.2.x revision) or the game just wasn't meant to be built against such an old version of Motif.\n\nConsidering that Lesstif was available contemporarily and Motif itself has since been open-sourced, this was really just a stunt. But it was fun!\n\n#RetroComputing #RetroDev\n\n\nhttps://blog.n8fq.org/social/jillybeans/s/post-7652e5e113059439aa0b6d8280bd8ac0.jpg",
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